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My experience from living in Hong Kong for 10 years was also that hand-written forms were often some kind of cursive/shorthand. I'm familiar with both traditio
by KMag 4y ago
My experience from living in Hong Kong for 10 years was also that hand-written forms were often some kind of cursive/shorthand. I'm familiar with both traditional and simplified characters, but I'd often encounter written forms that were more a shorthand/cursive form of traditional characters. I'm not sure if there was an official system, but reading handwriting was much different than reading my textbooks.
- thaumasiotes 4y ago> I'm not sure if there was an official system, but reading handwriting was much different than reading my textbooks. There is an official system. I don't know what it is and I can't read Chinese handwriting either, but I am assured that there is a system and, for example, it's possible for a Chinese person to view an unfamiliar handwritten character and be able to look it up by its standard form.
- zdragnar 4y agoThere is a formal, correct way to write characters, and common "cursive" doesn't follow it. Reading handwriting isn't quite so bad as the stereotypical doctor's handwriting in the west (or is that just an American thing?) but it definitely takes some practice getting familiar with the differences.
- xvilka 4y agoDoctors' handwriting in China is as unreadable to mere mortals as everywhere else. Thankfully, nowadays everything is digital or printed.
- jhanschoo 4y ago> There is a formal, correct way to write characters, and common "cursive" doesn't follow it. There are political attempts to formalize how to write characters, but there is no one correct way, only more common ways and less common ways. For example https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stroke_order#Stroke_order_per_polity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stroke_order#Stroke_order_per_... shows how a very common character is standardized to be written in different stroke orders. On to strokes themselves, you can see for example that there are multiple ways to correctly write the word for tiger even though standardizations has blessed one particular form: This is a standard way: http://www.sfzd.cn/gq/3/16/1/1671084904a28_170_0179b.jpg http://www.sfzd.cn/gq/3/16/1/1671084904a28_170_0179b.jpg But important authors have written it in this manner: http://www.sfzd.cn/gq/2/14/1/1669634829a4_919_396.jpg http://www.sfzd.cn/gq/2/14/1/1669634829a4_919_396.jpg and you frequently see this manner of writing in New Year calligraphy More examples: historically we have a character most commonly written 䖏, but standardized as (simplified) (CN) 处, (JP) 処, (HK/TW traditional) 處. Historically, 侯 was frequently written like 隹 with diagonal /\ at the bottom as in https://www.shufazidian.com/gq/1/8/46115.jpg https://www.shufazidian.com/gq/1/8/46115.jpg . Sometimes Chinese pedagogy has an air of "one stroke order", "one correct way", but this situation is a lot like with mcdojos where there are multiple idio-traditions that tend to think that they are an authority.
- thaumasiotes 4y agoIs there any relationship between shufazidian.com and sfzd.cn?
- jhanschoo 4y agoYeah, those links are taken from http://www.shufazidian.com/ http://www.shufazidian.com/ , and I didn't link to the search results themselves because their search results are stateful and opaque.
- ssnistfajen 4y agoA large chunk of the contemporary standard of simplified Chinese were basically just shorthand cursive forms that passed down the ages. It's just something people acquire by exposure/immersion.
- jhanschoo 4y agoYep there are cursive traditions for writing Chinese characters, and there is historically quite a bit of acceptable variation on how you write the characters (think lowercase 'a' or 'g' in Latin). Just like with Latin script ability to read cursive is also fading as people handwrite less; the computer/print forms you see come from the woodblock forms/Ming typeface and there's a large stylistic shift going from brush writing to woodblock forms.