Reddit reviews Chinese Cursive Script: An Introduction to Handwriting in Chinese (Far Eastern Publications Series)

The best way to learn to read handwritten Chinese is to learn to write handwritten Chinese.

This book is an old but good introduction in English.

If you are comfortable with Chinese only text, then I'd recommend this book, which is far more comprehensive.

You don't actually have to remember how to write the characters long-term, just go through all the exercises in those books and you'll find you'll then be able to read most handwriting without too much difficulty.

ITT: non-linguist students of Chinese saying "I can't understand Chinese Cursive Script, and only know the typeset forms of characters; they must be writing it wrong."

Yes, spelling errors occur. You can impress people at parties by correctly spelling 喷嚏 or 罐 as a foreigner. No, it is not the case that "nobody under, oh, 25 spells anything correctly anymore."

There are books to help. Here's an example:

Chinese Cursive Script: An Introduction to Handwriting in Chinese (Far Eastern Publications Series) https://www.amazon.com/dp/0887100333/ref=cm_sw_r_other_awd_eL1ywbVHX8TAC

Go to nciku.com, they have an application that can show you the correct stroke order.
Something that you need to understand, though, is that even if you make your handwriting look exactly like the printed font, that's going to be considered "bad" by most natives. It'll be kind of equivalent to what a 2nd graders handwriting in English looks like. What you (probably) want to work towards is being able to read/write handwritten characters (which is in fact a totally different skill than being able to read printed font).

http://www.amazon.com/Chinese-Cursive-Script-Introduction-Publications/dp/0887100333

This book is generally considered the best for teaching that skill. You'll learn how to make your characters look like an adult wrote them, and you'll learn to read handwritten characters instead of just printed font.

This book helped me a bit: http://www.amazon.com/Chinese-Cursive-Script-Introduction-Publications/dp/0887100333

But I'm still awful at it and end up asking native speakers to read handwritten things to me.

To be fair, my horrible English handwriting is probably just as indecipherable to them.

I also bought this book when I first started to learn, called Chinese Cursive Script: An Introduction to Handwriting in Chinese, by Fred Fang-yu Wang (non-affiliate Amazon link here). It's super old-school--it looks like a mimeograph and was written in 1958. If I remember correctly, it only includes traditional characters because of the date it was published. Regardless, many simplified/trad. characters look the same when written in cursive anyways. But it has great tips, and just helps you learn to read handwriting better anyways. I still have the book at home and I've been learning for 10 years.

Here is one approach to learning handwritten Chinese. And here is another resource, a book in Chinese about how to learn handwritten Chinese, and Amazon has something that appears to be similar. According to another Reddit post, " You can find a "preview" using a clever google search (add .pdf to its name). " One more book that may be helpful is the book from Yale UP on cursive Chinese.

Think of it like English, there are a handful of forms that are more or less standard. But everyone comes up with their own way of writing quickly, some closer to those "standards," others a bit farther away. But if an individual's writing gets too far away fromt the standard, then nobody can read it...it's like that. u/Luomulanren seems to be saying printed fonts and hand-written scripts naturally don't look the same, including variances like the "a" that you pointed out, as well as ornamental loops and how the letters are connected together.

These books are more geared towards writing, but one of the side benefits of learning to write is it improves your cursive reading skills.

https://www.amazon.com/Chinese-Cursive-Script-Introduction-Publications/dp/0887100333

http://detail.bookuu.com/2528718.html

Download a bunch of handwritten fonts. They are out there. Take a segment you can read in a regular font and see what they look like in the HW fonts.

Try writing in semi cursive w/o lifting off paper and you'll understand why some words are written the way they are.

I like the following book for handwriting.

​

https://www.amazon.com/Chinese-Cursive-Script-Introduction-Publications/dp/0887100333/ref=sr_1_6?keywords=chinese+handwriting&qid=1563310119&s=gateway&sr=8-6

> I'm gonna disagree here on a detail: 1,500 hanzi is, in my opinion, waaaay too high here for our purposes.

That's fair. I was trying to think about the point in learning where you've seen pretty much all of the common radicals and phonetic elements, such that learning the majority of new characters is just seeing a new combination of those (and then there are the characters with a radical and a phonetic element consisting of a character you already know, but you get the picture).

> Handwritten chinese is the WORST.

You might find this book on Chinese cursive useful. I bought it before I was able to put it to good use, so I didn't study it... and now I seem to have misplaced it. And yeah, real Chinese cursive is difficult. Even after years of seeing my wife's Chinese cursive, I can only recognize 1 in 3 characters on average.

Edit: Forgot to add the link to the book!

To all those who are struggling to read the cursive script, try this: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Chinese-Cursive-Script-Introduction-Publications/dp/0887100333/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1266575220&sr=8-1 It's a little dated but still useful.

http://www.amazon.com/Chinese-Cursive-Script-Introduction-Publications/dp/0887100333/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1370364920&sr=8-1&keywords=cursive+chinese

for calligraphy I strongly learning 楷書 or 篆書 first, then getting good at 楷書, to master the principles behind calligraphy correctly, only then will your 草書 reach its full potential...