Classical Chinese Primer
Calligraphy

For questions of character structure, see also the Characters page.

General

Learn character writing with a ball pen, a pad of paper, and a copy of Johan Björkstén, Learn to Write Chinese Characters. It is not well adapted to our vocabulary, but it will give the general idea. Don't get carried away by mystique about the characters. Forget about deducing the meaning of words from their written forms: meanings evolve in use, but written forms do not. And the now standard written forms were stylized almost past recognition in the script reform of the Chin Dynasty. So, don't philosophize the characters. Treat them as arbitrary word symbols. But do acquire them. Write out the lesson. More than once.

Knowing Chinese is a skill of your arm; it has nothing much to do with your mind.

Specific

For general principles of writing strokes and characters, follow Björkstén. You can safely start on p29. There is no need to memorize the calligrapher's terms for the various mistakes. As a general learning rule: Don't practice your mistakes; practice your successes.

Note especially the proper order and direction of strokes. Björkstén doesn't say it in so many words, but horizontal strokes are made from left to right, and vertical ones from top to bottom. Order of strokes within a character is generally from the upper left to the lower right. Some enclosing strokes look as though they should count as two, but actually count as one. It is helpful to get this straight because many books have character indexes that are based on stroke count.

Many strokes in printed characters have little knobs or flourishes, imitating the way a writing brush contacts or leaves the paper. A ball pen and a pad or paper (or a sheet of paper on top of an old magazine) will allow enough "give" in the writing surface to let you replicate these gestures for practice purposes.

Characters for the most part are ideally seen as written in a 3x3 grid of squares (allowing irregular division into 1+2, etc). A pad of squared "quadrille" paper may be helpful for practice. One with quarter-inch squares should be OK. You can't write really big without using your whole arm, but at the beginning, write as big as is comfortable for your wrist, to get the movements clearly into memory. You can make it smaller later. In making strokes, don't jab, and in ending them, don't recoil as though the paper were hot. Be comfortable on the paper. Don't bother with carbon ink, or for that matter with inkstones and brushes, and still less with inkstones made from stones from particular parts of China (though admittedly Dwanjou has very nice ones), unless you are an artist who is here for the calligraphy, and whose only interest in the texts is as a calligraphy base.

If you can find an empty classroom top practice in, fine. The side of a short piece of chalk on a blackboard is wonderful for giving scope to larger body movements. Larger body movements are highly mnemonic. And you look good doing them.

References to Björkstén's instructions for specific characters, when he has them, are given in the Dictionary as B plus a page number. A composite reference, with B plus two page numbers and a plus (+) sign between, refers to pages where the parts of the character are separately illustrated. You will quickly get the hang of it, and will no longer need stroke-by-stroke instructions for every new character.

Note that horizontal strokes are level in printed forms (as in the above lesson text), but in writing they slant slightly uphill to the right (correctly shown in Björkstén). Don't write flat, but also don't exaggerate this uphill lift. (Some Warring States calligraphers slanted their characters rather sharply uphill to the left. It makes a disconcerting impression on a modern reader).

If you are left-handed, you will have problems; make your best individual adjustment. In the Orient, left-handers are forcibly changed, so we have no precedents to offer you.

Help

As with your (Mandarin) pronunciation, it should be possible to find people to correct your calligraphy. It is partly to maintain this possibility that we are using Chin dynasty reformed characters, and not the actual script of the Warring States.

Classical Chinese Primer is Copyright © 2000- by E Bruce and A Taeko Brooks

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