@Maria I've seen the handwriting of Chinese doctors as well, and the vast majority is also illegible, at least to those outside of healthcare. Occasionally, if you know exactly what they're trying to say, you can see how their scribbles correspond to words, but even then it can take quite a bit of squinting.
I had no idea Japanese even HAD a cursive script. I guess I shouldn't be surprised, but with how complicated the characters already are (to me, anyways) I never thought cursive would be compatible.
One could say Chinese has a cursive script, or Japanese kanji has a cursive script. When you say Japanese has a cursive script, it sounds weird because Japanese kanas are either cursive on their own (hiragana) or do not have a cursive (katakana).
If you search "onnade" and "hiragana" [女手] you'll see samples of what looks like beautiful scribbles are actually legible writings written in the traditional format (vertically, right-to-left). It facilitated recordkeeping when information or transactions had to be recorded rapidly. Hiragana was developed by court ladies, that's why it was previously called "onnade" which lit means "woman's hand" before taking on the current name "hiragana".
My great-aunt was born during the Meiji Period (明治時代) in 1910. After surviving WW1 and WW2, she eventually came to America in the 70s and became a United States citizen in the 90s. Throughout her life until her passing in 2006, she had beautiful Japanese cursive writing. I have a lot of her letters and am in the process of archiving them digitally.
@Gary Allen A muséum? Bahahahahahhahahahaha this is the funniest shit I’ve ever seen 😂😂😂🤣🤣🤣🤣 This is not Japanese cursive, it’s Chinese, kanji literally means Chinese characters. Same with Hanza (Korean) and Hanzi (Chinese) Lots and lots of Chinese ppl can write like this, my parents have been writing like this for their entire life, hell I can somewhat even write like this.
Wow! I have been studying Japanese for 12 years and lived in Japan for 7 years, so many people would considered me super advance if not fluent. But I would never even imagine trying to read or write kanji in cursive. Yet this shows the richness and beautiful of both kanji and calligraphy. Wow!
For real I've literally never seen that! Been here 6 years, studied at school here for a full 2 years, senseis never even mentioned the existence of this "cursive" so I'm assuming nobody uses it. I've seen many people's handwritting, even old folks, and even old as fuck parchments etc, even on those the caligraphy is less hard to read than this 😂
Been studying Japanese intermittently for nearly 7 years now, and I literally just learned that this cursive script is a thing. I can see why it's not more widespread lol.
My great grandfather wrote a letter a long time ago and it's sitting there somewhere, the first time I read it it made no sense to me as there were no recognizable characters Now after seeing this it all makes sense Thanks a lot for this!
I have all the letters of my great grand father that he wrote home from war in a big box. Now, I'm German and we use latin letters and latin cursive so you'd think that it would be easy to just read them? But no chance back then they used a different style of cursive ( called sütterlin) and without learning that from scratch i have no chance to read those old letters. Not even my grandma can lol. So yeah you're not alone in not being able to read old letters even tho they are in the same language.
@@MCoTEDDY bro ngl you should really try to learn the writing if you haven't already because I think it would just be really cool to know what your great grandfather was writing about while in war. That's just me tho and nobody is forcing you
kanji is highly similar to simplified chinese, so my knowledge of the latter helped me understand how hard it can be to write the former then the cursive came in and i died
Japnese Kanji is much closer to traditional Chinese characters, just slightly simplified. Traditionally, Japanese Kanji = Traditional Chinese. But, the Japanese government announced Shinjitai (新字体) in 1946, trying to simplify the Kanji character. That's why they have the difference.
literally it will be "夫失先矢，克充，去", but incomprehensible at all :). If this is said in normal way, should follow "有夫遺其矢……" Yu Youren mentioned in Standard Cursive Script that "if two near similar characters cannot be identified via context meaning, it'll be better to write in ortho-form (章草) of them". An Orthocursive example is 急就章.
Fun fact: Cursive Script was invented earlier than regular script for hundreds of years. 艸書(Cursive) appeared around The Warring States period(475-221 b.c.) and was popular in Han and Jin (202b.c.-618), 楷/真書(Regular) appeared in Eastern Han Dynasty (25-220), popular after Tang dynasty (618-2022) --------- Thanks for the likes, here are some additions: In order to facilitate communication, it is necessary for the cultural circle of Chinese characters to achieve a unified standard. My suggestion is to re-divide the characters into two systems, regular script for printing and cursive script for handwriting, rather than just using distorted simplified regular script (a half-finished product of failed Latinization) or write complex traditional regular script stroke by stroke. In fact, quite a few simplified characters are derived from cursive script, which has previously been written in ligatures as an informal form rather than as standard regular script. In the 1930s, Mr. Yu Youren planned to promote his standard cursive script. Unfortunately, due to the long-term war and the division of the country, it was not realized. Cursive script is a convenient, practical and beautiful shorthand writing style, which needs to be revived!
Watching you write is always so peaceful. I am shocked at how the kanji look in cursive, I noticed most of these have some shared radicals in their normal version, but it looks extremely different as cursive.
@@julianw1010 right nobody cares about a comment about Kanji in cursive... under a video about Kanji in cursive.... Its 2022 being rude for no reason is lame af
I was recently at a North Texas museum that displayed some historical Japanese art pieces with painted markings quite unlike those I had seen for the Japanese language tests. A few Kanji reminded me of the capital Greek letter Sigma ”Σ”, much like a couple of the cursive Kanji here. I had decided then it must be some ancient form of Japanese script, but upon viewing this video, I’m not so sure those calligraphy marks were so different from this contemporaneous script. Thank you for the enlightenment!
I've been writing only in cursive since 1st grade, when I was in Highschool I asked my Japanese teacher if it was possible to write Japanese in cursive, with a big smile on her face she only said that it looks really weird and is very difficult to understand. 😆
When I was a university student, I asked my Japanese teacher (Japanese polyglot and linguist who can speak ~7-8 languages) about how I could learn writing in semi cursive like most Japanese people do in their daily life. He told me that he couldn't really teach me as you just learn it on your own as you learn how to write (and obviously, you must know the strokes order if you want to write in an understandable semihcursive or cursive handwriting). XD lol
I can't imagine the intensity a kid would have in examwhere he is like oh no it's the last 5 minutes yet he has to write those letters so elegantly and finely delivered. My writing goes on pair with doctors pesrcibed letters in those moments
They will use semi-cursive script instead of cursive script. Despite its English names, they were entirely different altogether. In fact cursive script is not the cursive version of the regular chinese letter or kanji, it's the cursive version of clerical script of ancient Chinese government.
This guy is a master. It's not a representative example of how people write on a daily basis. Most kids and adults don't write kanji so elegantly. Just like English, you see difficult to read handwriting in Japan also.
@@markj.a351 heck, I even heard with the advent of keyboard majority of younger Japanese can't even write most of common Kanji anymore, though they can recognize it.
@@mbrusyda9437 Haha, It's like kids nowadays can't spell their english right. Even Chinese can't write chinese correctly. Modern people has horrible handwriting
Seems to me the words are much more distinct in cursive. Also a lightbulb just went off in my head, there were Japanese exchange students in my class years ago. Their English handwriting was unbelievable neat and precise and it was all print, not joint letters. Seeing how they write in their own language explains a lot.
They look like the signals of sports at the Olympics when the firsts where full described and the last ones are mostly lines which reminds of the sport discipline
This is how my dad writes… He’s always in a rush, so he writes really fast. Even though my family is Chinese and not Japanese, many characters are very similar in both languages like the ones shown in the video.
That's because written Japanese takes characters from Chinese. Sometimes they even have the same meanings (though they are usually pronounced differently)
@@vancemccarthy2554 no they did have their own (and their own characters have a distinct flair which is pretty neat), but adopting Chinese characters wasn’t much of a choice. It also happened very long ago so the language has had plenty of time to fully normalize. But many centuries of colonialism between the two nations have left deep scars, including vast erasure of original Japanese characters. I’m pretty sure Okinawa even had distinct writing before Japan invaded them, but I’m remembering that kinda fuzzy
Hey, takeshi, what is that script doing? Its starting to believe, my dear naomi, it ascended to the land not many have the intellect to truly understand what the FUCK DOES THIS SHIT MEAN, NAOMI, WHAT THE FUCK IS THIS SUPPOSED TO MEAN!?
I was fearful when I learned Japanese has 3 alphabets. I was intimidated when I learned that one of them work similar to the Mandarin script. Now my life flashed before my eyes as I believed death had almost hit me from learning about Kanji cursive.
mandarin is not a script, merely a spoken language 漢字 hanzi is, the japanese pronunciation of hanzi is kanji which literally mean 「chinese characters」 the characters are shared by many languages in and out of china, korea used hanja and vietnam used chu nom
@@yurashida Well it doesn't matter at this point for me. In it's written form, it looks and works similar to each other, and now that you tell me the meaning of kanji, it proves that they work similarly.
@@robertsummers3386 you seem too misunderstand, mandarin is a language too which chinese characters are not exclusive too, it would be like saying 「germany uses english alphabet」 there are many languages in china (cantonese, hakka, wu, minnan, fuzhounese, mandarin) and they all use chinese character
The cursive is very beautiful to me. I like seeing it on handmade dolls and such. My Daruma has Fuku written in cursive on it and to me it is much more charming than the machine printed regular script.
@@solarprogeny6736 I would assume that is part of it but I think that also the visible handmade touch and the unique imperfections are also contributing factors. :)
@@samsemy6825 That is a very shallow and reductive point of view. Is a violin just a piece of wood? Is an artwork just a bunch of paint? Learning to recognise and appreciate the beauty of the world around us is an important skill and whilst we may be selective on what we find beautiful we shouldn't dismiss what others find beautiful.
All along I'd actually been looking at kanji trying to figure out which words were using cursive script and how to tell them apart. When I really should have paying more attention to the 'random scibbles' on the side. Mystery finally solved. Thank you.
This would be great system for an alien language in a game tbh, drawing lines and then drawing them again, but connecting the start and end points in cursive
These characters are also used in Mandarin, with the same meanings, which a lot of people in the world other than speaks (it’s just a bit regionally concentrated)
Although anyone trying to learn Japanese is going to have an easier time with the regular script. I can recognise a few kanji. That cursive on the other hand, although it looks really nice, yeah that would be hell to try to learn.
Chinese characters are shared culture across eastern Asia So non-Japanese like Korean, Vietnamese, Taiwanese, and of course Chinese can read it to varying degrees
This is by all means interesting. I also found amusing how the differences between some of them are really small in cursive, just like in regular writing, such as 太 and 犬, or 休 and 体.
You should only write cursive with a brush pen! The fact that most Japanese can’t tell the difference between those cursive kanji makes me feel a little better.
You surely can write 行草 with a pencil or ball pen. Virtually all hand written characters falls under this style For all languages, cursive writing emerge naturally with sped up hand writing No body will actually write in the "regular script" shown on the video, did you notice how impractically slow you need to write it that way?
Oh you have got to be kidding me. I love how Japanese is like if you somehow learn every kanji that exists, you can do it again but this time they look even more similar 😂
The cursive kanji here all have their similarities, but the only ones I can see getting /easily/ mixed up are "tip" and "overcome". The rest have clear enough distinctions to tell apart, though they admittedly look drastically different from their print-kanji counterparts.
I honestly feel as an American I would have more luck trying to master the cursive than the regular. Something about it just seems more natural. It sort of has a familiarity representing English cursive. It also kind of reminds me of Arabic, which I don't understand at all. Arabic only feels sort of familiar because I can read Hebrew which I get isn't really related, but I don't think in principle it's that incredibly far off. I'm trying to say is her subscript seems a little more digestible
I can barely tell the difference between some of the print characters. It boggles my mind that cursive kanji even exists. Why would the Japanese do something so cruel to themselves?
I have been studying ( on my own) Japanese for 8 years now, and this is my first time to learn about the existence of this cursive script . I knew only about kanji, hiragana (cursive) and katakana ( angular).
There are five traditional forms of Chinese calligraphy: Seal Character, Official Script, Formal Script, Running Script, Formal Script, Running Script, and Cursive Hand. These are considered classical arts and representative of Chinese art styles. The most popular calligraphy style is the Seal Character style developed by the Han people. It first appeared during the Zhou Dynasty (1045 - 221 BC) and is still popular among calligraphy artists today.
@@querimoniouslimner8081 Most would be able to read 3 of the 5 traditional scripts actually. Understanding would be dependent on level of education, the other 2 scripts would actually require learning.
Japanese is an extremely interesting language, but the more I watch these calligraphy videos the more I accept that I'll never have the will to learn something SO complicated
I blame cultural conservatives who refuse to let go of clunky old traditions. Make written Japanese all kana, throw in some spaces, and you're good to go. The traditionalists will whine about homophones, but for some reason there's no mass confusion with the spoken language. Schools could save literal years of time to spend on education that's actually useful, instead of teaching what's effectively half of an extra language just so people can write in their first language.
@@firstnamelastname8439 People do not mistake homophones due to the fact that various words that contain the same letters have different pitch accents, they should also develop a system to write these.
Seems simple if anything. Overcome and sufficiency are different by making a square in the middle versus a triangle lol. Too words that are not spelled the same it all. The cursive version is even easier.
@@firstnamelastname8439 even without all the homophones, it's still a terrible, terrible idea. for example, when you're driving to a certain place, you must be able to identify traffic signs quickly, because you're often going really fast, and stopping all the damn time to read them would be very counter-intuitive. and reading a massive string of kana can be difficult to do quickly. this is an instance where kanji can be pretty useful, because you can fit all the needed information in much less characters, thus making it easier to read. there is a reason why previous attempts to remove kanji have kinda failed.
English has cursive fonts as well. I've always pondered what cursive English must look like to someone whose never seen it. This video answers my question. Of course short hand looks completely foreign to me but was something most students in the U.S. would learn 60 yrs ago. Not anymore though.
Considering how decorative and flowing Kanji is, and how difficult learning to read and write it can be, and the fact they already have a formal and informal script, I'm surprised the Japanese were masochistic enough to invent a CURSIVE version as well, and totally unsurprised that most Japanes have never in their lives bothered to learn it.
If it was similar to how English went about it I’d imagine the cursive script was older if anything. Flowing lines are much easier to write with when using quills and older styles of writing implements.
@@axiomshift4666 Well, yeah, but the point of cursive is continuous ink flow to ensure smooth writing from a quill or fountain or other nib type pen. The Japanese didn't traditionally write with quills or other nib style pens, they used brushes. So I am pretty sure Japanese cursive probably came about LATER rather than sooner, as nib pens became common in the country. Which means probably around the Meiji Restoration, when Meiji ended the nation's self-sequestering.
@@GuukanKitsune it’s easier to write with fewer brush strokes as well. Similar principle. From what I read it appeared in ancient china because it helped to write things faster.
@@GuukanKitsune Even today cursive is much more efficient as a form of writing if you know how to do it. Just most people don’t even bother learning how to do it since most communication is digital now.
Ok I see now, this is the extra writing on the side of some rice paper prints. I always thought it was just more characters I didn't recognize but now I understand it was the artist freestyling in the margins.
No wonder. I don't always get how the cursive shapes are related to the classical shapes either. (The same problem is with the cursive Hebrew script, by the way. It looks utterly unrelated to the beautiful, aesthetical script sofers copy the Tora in)
True, but the main difference is that there are only 22 characters in Hebrew as opposed to the 3,000 or so Kanji characters. In fact even if you learned the two Hebrew scripts, you would still be learning less characters / combinations than if you were to learn Hiragana. Also I personally really dislike non-cursive Hebrew haha
@@MizManFryingP You're right, the characters themselves are only 44 ones (46 if you consider shin and sin different letters). However, even in Hebrew, the written words are half like kanji for the beginner. Because just some of the vowels are actually written and you have to learn the pronunciation by heart until you have grasped how the vocalization works.
In Japanese kanji the order of strokes in important. If you link at the cursive characters, they're basically the "flow" of the pen through the print character in the order & direction of the strokes. Add to that a couple of stops to emphasize a line or a change in direction and you've got the cursive
Fun fact: As an American, I lived in Japan. It only took me a few months to learn how to speak it. I learned that most of the Japanese citizens I met could not read japanese that well at all.
cuz they didn't really have their own writing system so they had to borrow another writing system that had substance and 'structure'. When I see their writing all I see are random squiggles. There are at laest 3 writing systems. Not exactly sure how that's supposed to make everything convenient....
@@drakke125Channel The reason they have multiple writing systems is because kanji can be read multiple ways. By combining kanji with hiragana you can illustrate how it's supposed to be pronounced. Katakana is for loanwords. Without one of these systems everything becomes much less clear to read. No hiragana and you have no idea how to read any of the kanji. No kanji and you run into the issue of Japan having a lot of homophones with no easy way to distinguish them. No kana and loanwords actually become much more difficult to identify what it's supposed to mean.
@@faraaq lol. I fancy myself one day learning japanese, but you gotta see the facts. They borrowed their writting from the chinese. Both them and the chinese had to learn english in order to use computers. Yes, they can write in japanese on computers, but it's super weird and such a hassle. And most of their population don't know how to write it correctly or they know only a finite amount of kanji because there are freaking thousands to learn! I mean... That is what deserves an Yikes lol
I think we are all forgetting that these cursive kanji would have context behind them. Consider the following: He is right. VS He is right-handed. We know which definition of "right" is being used because of the context in the sentence. So although these Kanji would have very similar looks, in context they could be discernable.
When I was about to judge it from the perspective of Chinese, I suddenly realises that it is Japanese XD but it is really good. I mean this Japanese word represent those English much better than we do in Chinese vocabs. To my Understanding, it is what Chinese is about, using the least amount of words to represent the most meaning. Great video, you wrote these words much better than I can. XDDD Edit : added the edit section, corrected the incorrect words due to Siri on-board dictation(changing ”a jacket” to “to judge it”)
Learning Japanese as a second language I admit cursive completely confounds me. Sometimes people know something is in Japanese (but it's cursive) and they ask me what it says and I'm just like "No idea."
This made me think about how terrifying doctors that write kanji must be
kkkkkkkkkkkkkk
Omfg what a horrifying thought
I work at hospital in Japan and the chart is handwritten.
I spend a lot of time reading Japanese.
Is that reference to Unit 731?
@Maria I've seen the handwriting of Chinese doctors as well, and the vast majority is also illegible, at least to those outside of healthcare. Occasionally, if you know exactly what they're trying to say, you can see how their scribbles correspond to words, but even then it can take quite a bit of squinting.
I had no idea Japanese even HAD a cursive script. I guess I shouldn't be surprised, but with how complicated the characters already are (to me, anyways) I never thought cursive would be compatible.
One could say Chinese has a cursive script, or Japanese kanji has a cursive script. When you say Japanese has a cursive script, it sounds weird because Japanese kanas are either cursive on their own (hiragana) or do not have a cursive (katakana).
You should play taiko
If you search "onnade" and "hiragana" [女手] you'll see samples of what looks like beautiful scribbles are actually legible writings written in the traditional format (vertically, right-to-left). It facilitated recordkeeping when information or transactions had to be recorded rapidly. Hiragana was developed by court ladies, that's why it was previously called "onnade" which lit means "woman's hand" before taking on the current name "hiragana".
Hiragana is literally cursive Kanji
Russian doesn't look complicated. It's almost similar to Roman letters. But look at their cursive
My great-aunt was born during the Meiji Period (明治時代) in 1910. After surviving WW1 and WW2, she eventually came to America in the 70s and became a United States citizen in the 90s. Throughout her life until her passing in 2006, she had beautiful Japanese cursive writing. I have a lot of her letters and am in the process of archiving them digitally.
@Gary Allen A muséum? Bahahahahahhahahahaha this is the funniest shit I’ve ever seen 😂😂😂🤣🤣🤣🤣
This is not Japanese cursive, it’s Chinese, kanji literally means Chinese characters. Same with Hanza (Korean) and Hanzi (Chinese)
Lots and lots of Chinese ppl can write like this, my parents have been writing like this for their entire life, hell I can somewhat even write like this.
The problem with cursive script is that it has significant variance. Just like long hand in English. Often only the writer can clearly read it.
@@skybananaqueen4051 It literally says japanese kanji on the title of the video
@Sky banana Queen imperialist spotted
Nowadays it's very few people that care about preserving their cultural or ancestral treasures like those. Good for you 🙌
Wow! I have been studying Japanese for 12 years and lived in Japan for 7 years, so many people would considered me super advance if not fluent. But I would never even imagine trying to read or write kanji in cursive. Yet this shows the richness and beautiful of both kanji and calligraphy. Wow!
Fun fact, the Japanese stole the Chinese script
For real I've literally never seen that! Been here 6 years, studied at school here for a full 2 years, senseis never even mentioned the existence of this "cursive" so I'm assuming nobody uses it. I've seen many people's handwritting, even old folks, and even old as fuck parchments etc, even on those the caligraphy is less hard to read than this 😂
Huggless virgin energy
@@probedthe7343 was about to say that... but japanese basically uses what are considered traditional characters
@The Only Limited Guy 🏳️🌈⃠ fun for me
Been studying Japanese intermittently for nearly 7 years now, and I literally just learned that this cursive script is a thing. I can see why it's not more widespread lol.
Looks like now you gotta spend another 7 years on the cursive script 😂
I think it's mostly used for caligraphy
Watch a lot of anime huh
Even as a Japanese person, I have just learned that there was a thing called cursive script
There’s no way you’ve been studying Japanese and never learned about this
My great grandfather wrote a letter a long time ago and it's sitting there somewhere, the first time I read it it made no sense to me as there were no recognizable characters
Now after seeing this it all makes sense
Thanks a lot for this!
I have all the letters of my great grand father that he wrote home from war in a big box. Now, I'm German and we use latin letters and latin cursive so you'd think that it would be easy to just read them?
But no chance back then they used a different style of cursive ( called sütterlin) and without learning that from scratch i have no chance to read those old letters. Not even my grandma can lol.
So yeah you're not alone in not being able to read old letters even tho they are in the same language.
@@MCoTEDDY bro ngl you should really try to learn the writing if you haven't already because I think it would just be really cool to know what your great grandfather was writing about while in war. That's just me tho and nobody is forcing you
my great great great grandfather also wrote a letter
but he was a doctor 💀
@@MCoTEDDY Reading Sütterlin can really be hard but imagine that with over 100 times more characters...
kanji is highly similar to simplified chinese, so my knowledge of the latter helped me understand how hard it can be to write the former
then the cursive came in and i died
I live in China and I had same thought.
Japnese Kanji is much closer to traditional Chinese characters, just slightly simplified.
Traditionally, Japanese Kanji = Traditional Chinese.
But, the Japanese government announced Shinjitai (新字体) in 1946, trying to simplify the Kanji character.
That's why they have the difference.
the only word that threw me off was arrow since I assumed it to be written as 箭
Imagine writing “A husband loses his arrow tip, overcomes sufficiency, and leaves” in kanji
literally it will be "夫失先矢，克充，去", but incomprehensible at all :). If this is said in normal way, should follow "有夫遺其矢……"
Yu Youren mentioned in Standard Cursive Script that "if two near similar characters cannot be identified via context meaning, it'll be better to write in ortho-form (章草) of them". An Orthocursive example is 急就章.
Fun fact: Cursive Script was invented earlier than regular script for hundreds of years.
艸書(Cursive) appeared around The Warring States period(475-221 b.c.) and was popular in Han and Jin (202b.c.-618),
楷/真書(Regular) appeared in Eastern Han Dynasty (25-220), popular after Tang dynasty (618-2022)
---------
Thanks for the likes, here are some additions:
In order to facilitate communication, it is necessary for the cultural circle of Chinese characters to achieve a unified standard. My suggestion is to re-divide the characters into two systems, regular script for printing and cursive script for handwriting, rather than just using distorted simplified regular script (a half-finished product of failed Latinization) or write complex traditional regular script stroke by stroke. In fact, quite a few simplified characters are derived from cursive script, which has previously been written in ligatures as an informal form rather than as standard regular script. In the 1930s, Mr. Yu Youren planned to promote his standard cursive script. Unfortunately, due to the long-term war and the division of the country, it was not realized. Cursive script is a convenient, practical and beautiful shorthand writing style, which needs to be revived!
Bruh why you using 艸 just write 草
Because they had a different regular script back then, 金文？ 隸書？
Cursive is just a natural way of writing after brush and paper were invented.
That makes cursive, regular. And regular, cursive. Everything you know is a lie
@@li_tsz_fung yep, 篆書 was popular in the qin dynasty as an engraved script, then 隸(隶)书 was adopted more in the Han dynastly written with a brush
@@azpineapple understandable
Watching you write is always so peaceful. I am shocked at how the kanji look in cursive, I noticed most of these have some shared radicals in their normal version, but it looks extremely different as cursive.
Yeah nobody cares
I care
@@julianw1010 right nobody cares about a comment about Kanji in cursive... under a video about Kanji in cursive.... Its 2022 being rude for no reason is lame af
@@GeeeTii 賛成ね
Amazing video. I was on the edge my seat the entire time. Pure excitement from start to finish. Only now catching my breath.
Therapist: Japanese cursive isn’t real, it can’t hurt you.
Japanese cursive:
I was recently at a North Texas museum that displayed some historical Japanese art pieces with painted markings quite unlike those I had seen for the Japanese language tests. A few Kanji reminded me of the capital Greek letter Sigma ”Σ”, much like a couple of the cursive Kanji here. I had decided then it must be some ancient form of Japanese script, but upon viewing this video, I’m not so sure those calligraphy marks were so different from this contemporaneous script. Thank you for the enlightenment!
Was it that Samurai exhibit in Dallas?
Sigma male in Greek?
Well according to some other comments, this particular cursive script does indeed have ancient roots.
@@funnycheesecakes it all made sense. All the great historians, all the strong warriors
Cursive Kanji actually predates Japans writing system of Kanji itself, kanji is simplified cursive basically lol
逆にこれを「解読」できる歴史学者の方々の凄さよ…。
それな。
Que hermosa caligrafía. Felicitaciones. Saludos desde Argentina
いいけど、ペンがすごい
クヨクヨ
く
i got a pack of sarasa clips because of your videos, they're very nice.
I learned nothing, and was completely confused the whole time. Thank you that was fantastic.
I've been writing only in cursive since 1st grade, when I was in Highschool I asked my Japanese teacher if it was possible to write Japanese in cursive, with a big smile on her face she only said that it looks really weird and is very difficult to understand. 😆
When I was a university student, I asked my Japanese teacher (Japanese polyglot and linguist who can speak ~7-8 languages) about how I could learn writing in semi cursive like most Japanese people do in their daily life. He told me that he couldn't really teach me as you just learn it on your own as you learn how to write (and obviously, you must know the strokes order if you want to write in an understandable semihcursive or cursive handwriting). XD lol
Respect.
I can't imagine the intensity a kid would have in examwhere he is like oh no it's the last 5 minutes yet he has to write those letters so elegantly and finely delivered. My writing goes on pair with doctors pesrcibed letters in those moments
They will use semi-cursive script instead of cursive script. Despite its English names, they were entirely different altogether. In fact cursive script is not the cursive version of the regular chinese letter or kanji, it's the cursive version of clerical script of ancient Chinese government.
This guy is a master. It's not a representative example of how people write on a daily basis. Most kids and adults don't write kanji so elegantly. Just like English, you see difficult to read handwriting in Japan also.
@@markj.a351 heck, I even heard with the advent of keyboard majority of younger Japanese can't even write most of common Kanji anymore, though they can recognize it.
@@mbrusyda9437 Haha, It's like kids nowadays can't spell their english right. Even Chinese can't write chinese correctly. Modern people has horrible handwriting
@@limitlesssky3050 most people spell english correctly, another thing are abbreviations like “u”. Handwriting is another thing
Seems to me the words are much more distinct in cursive. Also a lightbulb just went off in my head, there were Japanese exchange students in my class years ago. Their English handwriting was unbelievable neat and precise and it was all print, not joint letters. Seeing how they write in their own language explains a lot.
They look like the signals of sports at the Olympics when the firsts where full described and the last ones are mostly lines which reminds of the sport discipline
This is how my dad writes… He’s always in a rush, so he writes really fast. Even though my family is Chinese and not Japanese, many characters are very similar in both languages like the ones shown in the video.
That's because written Japanese takes characters from Chinese. Sometimes they even have the same meanings (though they are usually pronounced differently)
@@moothu sometimes they have the same pronunciation
@@CrimsonKnightmare1 At the very least, similar
The Japanese didn't have a written language and adapted the Chinese one.
@@vancemccarthy2554 no they did have their own (and their own characters have a distinct flair which is pretty neat), but adopting Chinese characters wasn’t much of a choice. It also happened very long ago so the language has had plenty of time to fully normalize. But many centuries of colonialism between the two nations have left deep scars, including vast erasure of original Japanese characters. I’m pretty sure Okinawa even had distinct writing before Japan invaded them, but I’m remembering that kinda fuzzy
Normal: clearly defined lines, neatly done
Script: a modern art interpretation of the normal way of writing.
Hey, takeshi, what is that script doing?
Its starting to believe, my dear naomi, it ascended to the land not many have the intellect to truly understand what the FUCK DOES THIS SHIT MEAN, NAOMI, WHAT THE FUCK IS THIS SUPPOSED TO MEAN!?
Absolutely beautiful handwriting!!!
So beautiful and relaxing to watch. Thanks.
I'd love more of this. This was very interesting amd relaxing to watch
「先生」って草書体で書かれたら、逆に書かれても気づかないかもしれない！
That pen sounds really nice to write with
I love watching you write. And do you have any recommended resources for writing cursive like that?
右側の文字が、完全に眠くならながらも書いてぐちゃぐちゃになった文字そのもの
めっちゃわかります！w
クヨクヨ
,The regular script is easy, I know all of them, but the cursive script ? all of them looked the same to me
草
I was fearful when I learned Japanese has 3 alphabets. I was intimidated when I learned that one of them work similar to the Mandarin script. Now my life flashed before my eyes as I believed death had almost hit me from learning about Kanji cursive.
I mean we don't particularly use þ nor ð day to day in english either, I'd be interested to know if this is more than a historical curiosity
@@gigitrix Yeah, we sort of got rid of those a while ago. That's when English was more German sounding than it is today.
mandarin is not a script, merely a spoken language
漢字 hanzi is, the japanese pronunciation of hanzi is kanji which literally mean 「chinese characters」
the characters are shared by many languages in and out of china, korea used hanja and vietnam used chu nom
@@yurashida Well it doesn't matter at this point for me. In it's written form, it looks and works similar to each other, and now that you tell me the meaning of kanji, it proves that they work similarly.
@@robertsummers3386 you seem too misunderstand, mandarin is a language too which chinese characters are not exclusive too, it would be like saying 「germany uses english alphabet」
there are many languages in china (cantonese, hakka, wu, minnan, fuzhounese, mandarin) and they all use chinese character
That pen being so clean and smooth is top notch asmr for me.
Not sure why this channel was recommended, but I am happy it was.
Takumi: Most Japanese can't read cursive writing.
Me who didn't knew Japanese even had a cursive writing: 😵
More like Chinese characters have a cursive script among a few others
The cursive is very beautiful to me. I like seeing it on handmade dolls and such. My Daruma has Fuku written in cursive on it and to me it is much more charming than the machine printed regular script.
クヨクヨ
i think it's "charming" because it's rare. if cursive was the standard alphabet then regular would seem charming.
@@solarprogeny6736 I would assume that is part of it but I think that also the visible handmade touch and the unique imperfections are also contributing factors. :)
mate it's squiggles.
@@samsemy6825 That is a very shallow and reductive point of view. Is a violin just a piece of wood? Is an artwork just a bunch of paint? Learning to recognise and appreciate the beauty of the world around us is an important skill and whilst we may be selective on what we find beautiful we shouldn't dismiss what others find beautiful.
It's like shorthand. Looks much easier to write cursive, but the regular writing is just so beautiful to look at.
Didn't even hear about this in my Japanese language class in HS, this is completely news to me that you have a cursive version!
It's pretty.
よくある勘違いとして、漢字の字体の変遷（おおまか）
甲骨文字→金文→篆書→隷書→草書→行書→楷書
亀の甲羅や骨に字を彫ってたのが、金属や石に彫るようになり、木簡や竹簡に筆で書くようになり、紙に筆で書くようになる
その過程で速記できるようになったので、崩し字が生まれるわけだが、崩しすぎて分けわからんようになったので生まれたのが楷書
つまり、楷書を崩したのが草書ではない
隷書を崩したのが草書
ですから、我々がよく知ってる楷書から草書を想像するのが困難な場合がある
書道を10年やって、やっと読めるようになった。
良かった
そして書きしますか？
Thank God for Google translate otherwise I wouldn't know what this comment was
All along I'd actually been looking at kanji trying to figure out which words were using cursive script and how to tell them apart.
When I really should have paying more attention to the 'random scibbles' on the side.
Mystery finally solved. Thank you.
So cool! I'm sure this has been asked but, what kind of pen is that? Really love the flow of it. Thanks
こんなような字を筆で書いてはいましたけど、これだけ似た字を集めるとどれがどれか判断しにくいですね
Cursive kanji look like bad doctors’ signatures 😭
I was going to comment the same 😂
Ayo dont gotta roast the ancestors like that hehehhee 😂😂😂😂
True LOL
Thinking the same thing! Yowza!
Medico here, can confirm
it says PARACETAMOL
Looks easier then regular script to write but very hard to tell characters apart from each other without perfect handwriting
He started writing in cursive, and I just cry.
たくさんの漢字の中から違うものを一つ探せ系のやつ、草書体でやったら、難易度爆上がりしそうw
Now this was surprising, but very informative
This would be great system for an alien language in a game tbh, drawing lines and then drawing them again, but connecting the start and end points in cursive
Fun fact: Most non-Japanese can't read either of the scripts.
I will admit it was an interesting watch tho. You've got amazing handwriting
I can read the script on the sides and I think most of the people watching this video can too ha
These characters are also used in Mandarin, with the same meanings, which a lot of people in the world other than speaks (it’s just a bit regionally concentrated)
Although anyone trying to learn Japanese is going to have an easier time with the regular script. I can recognise a few kanji. That cursive on the other hand, although it looks really nice, yeah that would be hell to try to learn.
Chinese characters are shared culture across eastern Asia
So non-Japanese like Korean, Vietnamese, Taiwanese, and of course Chinese can read it to varying degrees
This is by all means interesting. I also found amusing how the differences between some of them are really small in cursive, just like in regular writing, such as 太 and 犬, or 休 and 体.
The first two example..... One of them must mean dog, I'm not sure, but I'm very sure
@@kakyoindonut3213 犬 is indeed dog, 太 means big.
I mean in simplified Chinese 入，人，八，儿，and 几 all mean completely different things
∆
π
what does this mean in Japanese
@@JAYGURUDEVMFG I can't tell if you're being serious because both of those are greek
I’m finally understanding my doctor’s prescription after seeing this video. Thanks
What pen are you using to write with the lines look so good
You should only write cursive with a brush pen!
The fact that most Japanese can’t tell the difference between those cursive kanji makes me feel a little better.
You surely can write 行草 with a pencil or ball pen. Virtually all hand written characters falls under this style
For all languages, cursive writing emerge naturally with sped up hand writing
No body will actually write in the "regular script" shown on the video, did you notice how impractically slow you need to write it that way?
@@play005517 I meant just for these videos. It looks cooler.
Oh you have got to be kidding me. I love how Japanese is like if you somehow learn every kanji that exists, you can do it again but this time they look even more similar 😂
Haha
The only place I recall seeing cursive kanji is on promoted side of shogi pieces. Maybe as sound effects in panels of a manga.
I didnt even know there was cursive for kanji 🤯 this is beautiful!!
The cursive kanji here all have their similarities, but the only ones I can see getting /easily/ mixed up are "tip" and "overcome". The rest have clear enough distinctions to tell apart, though they admittedly look drastically different from their print-kanji counterparts.
I honestly feel as an American I would have more luck trying to master the cursive than the regular. Something about it just seems more natural. It sort of has a familiarity representing English cursive. It also kind of reminds me of Arabic, which I don't understand at all. Arabic only feels sort of familiar because I can read Hebrew which I get isn't really related, but I don't think in principle it's that incredibly far off.
I'm trying to say is her subscript seems a little more digestible
I can barely tell the difference between some of the print characters. It boggles my mind that cursive kanji even exists. Why would the Japanese do something so cruel to themselves?
It was nice and learning something new I had 🤷♀️
Just what I needed to see .
Despite that I can't read Kanji. I really like the character for "Overcome." The square symbol is really cool.
Can sensei do a comparison between the standard character forms of Hong Kong, Taiwan, Japan, Korea and PRC?
by PRC you mean mainland China
@@2520WasTaken Sure
dot forget bout viet'nam, it also has its own characters
@@equilibrum999 But they don't have a standard form
sounds cool
I have been studying ( on my own) Japanese for 8 years now, and this is my first time to learn about the existence of this cursive script .
I knew only about kanji, hiragana (cursive) and katakana ( angular).
what pen is being used to write this script... it seems very smoothe ink flow ...... nice video..
There are five traditional forms of Chinese calligraphy: Seal Character, Official Script, Formal Script, Running Script, Formal Script, Running Script, and Cursive Hand. These are considered classical arts and representative of Chinese art styles.
The most popular calligraphy style is the Seal Character style developed by the Han people. It first appeared during the Zhou Dynasty (1045 - 221 BC) and is still popular among calligraphy artists today.
To be honest ,normally no one in China can read those either,expect people who learning how to write the specific font.
@@querimoniouslimner8081 Most would be able to read 3 of the 5 traditional scripts actually. Understanding would be dependent on level of education, the other 2 scripts would actually require learning.
Cool, I think you forgot to mention the Formal Script and the Running Script though
The most popular style is obviously the regular script because we all use regular script in our daily life.
@@querimoniouslimner8081 clerical script and semi cursive script aka running script are easy to read, the other 2 are hard.
Daimyo recieved a letter in cursive, he was invited to a tea party, but didn't understood it and instead started a war, just in case
Such beautiful handwriting. Can you do the language Urdu someday? It's my mother language.😊
Dude what's wrong with your penmanship??? It's so good👌🏾
I've been learning how to write for 20 years now,, I'm still not good at it..
アルファベットだとどんな単語も26種類しかない字で表すから前後から推し量るのムズいけど無駄に何千文字あるから似てて区別つかなくてもある程度前後から推し量れちゃうね
龍体文字やヲシテ文字も紹介して下さい！
I would never be able to distinguish between the small changes in the symbols.
This is so peaceful, what pen do you use btw?😁 Thanks
うーむ、違いは誤差の範囲内ですなww
Japanese is an extremely interesting language, but the more I watch these calligraphy videos the more I accept that I'll never have the will to learn something SO complicated
I blame cultural conservatives who refuse to let go of clunky old traditions.
Make written Japanese all kana, throw in some spaces, and you're good to go.
The traditionalists will whine about homophones, but for some reason there's no mass confusion with the spoken language.
Schools could save literal years of time to spend on education that's actually useful, instead of
teaching what's effectively half of an extra language just so people can write in their first language.
@@firstnamelastname8439 People do not mistake homophones due to the fact that various words that contain the same letters have different pitch accents, they should also develop a system to write these.
Seems simple if anything. Overcome and sufficiency are different by making a square in the middle versus a triangle lol. Too words that are not spelled the same it all. The cursive version is even easier.
@@firstnamelastname8439 even without all the homophones, it's still a terrible, terrible idea. for example, when you're driving to a certain place, you must be able to identify traffic signs quickly, because you're often going really fast, and stopping all the damn time to read them would be very counter-intuitive. and reading a massive string of kana can be difficult to do quickly. this is an instance where kanji can be pretty useful, because you can fit all the needed information in much less characters, thus making it easier to read. there is a reason why previous attempts to remove kanji have kinda failed.
@@erronblack308 I feel like it would be difficult to read on the fly though due to the similarities between all those kanji.
English has cursive fonts as well. I've always pondered what cursive English must look like to someone whose never seen it.
This video answers my question. Of course short hand looks completely foreign to me but was something most students in the U.S. would learn 60 yrs ago. Not anymore though.
So much room for error! Very impressive, yet…slightly terrifying…
「先夫が去った矢先」
これに書き手の字の癖も入るから、
もはやそれが、達筆なのか悪筆なのか、区別がつかんww
克充（よしみつ・かちみつ・かつみつ）も足しておこう。
「先夫…克充が去った矢先」
んーまあ、よくよく見るとその文字との面影はあると思うけど、パッと見で読める人は凄い
漢字 what a beautiful style of writing!
I think I've seen that as calligraphy by brush before.
I thought it were simply signs I can't read or an alternative writing system/alphabet.
Me: only knows N5 to N4 Kanji
Also me: time to learn cursive kanji!
Considering how decorative and flowing Kanji is, and how difficult learning to read and write it can be, and the fact they already have a formal and informal script, I'm surprised the Japanese were masochistic enough to invent a CURSIVE version as well, and totally unsurprised that most Japanes have never in their lives bothered to learn it.
If it was similar to how English went about it I’d imagine the cursive script was older if anything. Flowing lines are much easier to write with when using quills and older styles of writing implements.
@@axiomshift4666 Well, yeah, but the point of cursive is continuous ink flow to ensure smooth writing from a quill or fountain or other nib type pen.
The Japanese didn't traditionally write with quills or other nib style pens, they used brushes.
So I am pretty sure Japanese cursive probably came about LATER rather than sooner, as nib pens became common in the country.
Which means probably around the Meiji Restoration, when Meiji ended the nation's self-sequestering.
@@GuukanKitsune it’s easier to write with fewer brush strokes as well. Similar principle. From what I read it appeared in ancient china because it helped to write things faster.
@@GuukanKitsune Even today cursive is much more efficient as a form of writing if you know how to do it. Just most people don’t even bother learning how to do it since most communication is digital now.
@@axiomshift4666 Yes, but they had that down with brushes WITHOUT having cursive.
Makes me realize how simple and effective latin alphabet is, I'm so grateful for this
Ok I see now, this is the extra writing on the side of some rice paper prints. I always thought it was just more characters I didn't recognize but now I understand it was the artist freestyling in the margins.
これはあれだ、前後の文字（文章）からこの内のどれかを推測して解読するんだよ
No wonder. I don't always get how the cursive shapes are related to the classical shapes either. (The same problem is with the cursive Hebrew script, by the way. It looks utterly unrelated to the beautiful, aesthetical script sofers copy the Tora in)
True, but the main difference is that there are only 22 characters in Hebrew as opposed to the 3,000 or so Kanji characters.
In fact even if you learned the two Hebrew scripts, you would still be learning less characters / combinations than if you were to learn Hiragana.
Also I personally really dislike non-cursive Hebrew haha
no one cares Jewy
@@MizManFryingP You're right, the characters themselves are only 44 ones (46 if you consider shin and sin different letters). However, even in Hebrew, the written words are half like kanji for the beginner. Because just some of the vowels are actually written and you have to learn the pronunciation by heart until you have grasped how the vocalization works.
@@mysteriumvitae5338 it's almost like japanese took the worst parts from other languages, just for the heck of it.
In Japanese kanji the order of strokes in important. If you link at the cursive characters, they're basically the "flow" of the pen through the print character in the order & direction of the strokes. Add to that a couple of stops to emphasize a line or a change in direction and you've got the cursive
The upper party remains the while the different bottoms have different arrows(?)
No. All i have got to say is that, this writer writes so beautifully. It's like a print!
This is the boss level of cursive writing.
Someone saw the "N" and "tsu" letters in katakana and decided to do the same thing to all of the Kanji.
I didn't that there was a cursive script of japanese
Fun fact: As an American, I lived in Japan. It only took me a few months to learn how to speak it. I learned that most of the Japanese citizens I met could not read japanese that well at all.
cuz they didn't really have their own writing system so they had to borrow another writing system that had substance and 'structure'.
When I see their writing all I see are random squiggles. There are at laest 3 writing systems. Not exactly sure how that's supposed to make everything convenient....
@@drakke125Channel The reason they have multiple writing systems is because kanji can be read multiple ways. By combining kanji with hiragana you can illustrate how it's supposed to be pronounced. Katakana is for loanwords. Without one of these systems everything becomes much less clear to read. No hiragana and you have no idea how to read any of the kanji. No kanji and you run into the issue of Japan having a lot of homophones with no easy way to distinguish them. No kana and loanwords actually become much more difficult to identify what it's supposed to mean.
@@dragoknighte48 I guess at some point they should just give up and move on to a latin based language lol
@@CeceliPS3 Yikes
@@faraaq lol. I fancy myself one day learning japanese, but you gotta see the facts. They borrowed their writting from the chinese. Both them and the chinese had to learn english in order to use computers. Yes, they can write in japanese on computers, but it's super weird and such a hassle. And most of their population don't know how to write it correctly or they know only a finite amount of kanji because there are freaking thousands to learn! I mean... That is what deserves an Yikes lol
please tell us what pen you use in each video
先と克がそんな、無いような差で分けられてるのは納得がいかない(￣^￣)
I think we are all forgetting that these cursive kanji would have context behind them.
Consider the following:
He is right. VS He is right-handed.
We know which definition of "right" is being used because of the context in the sentence. So although these Kanji would have very similar looks, in context they could be discernable.
When I was about to judge it from the perspective of Chinese, I suddenly realises that it is Japanese XD but it is really good. I mean this Japanese word represent those English much better than we do in Chinese vocabs. To my Understanding, it is what Chinese is about, using the least amount of words to represent the most meaning. Great video, you wrote these words much better than I can. XDDD
Edit : added the edit section, corrected the incorrect words due to Siri on-board dictation(changing ”a jacket” to “to judge it”)
I came to check it out but stayed for that penmanship.
Learning Japanese as a second language I admit cursive completely confounds me. Sometimes people know something is in Japanese (but it's cursive) and they ask me what it says and I'm just like "No idea."
Don't worry, it's not used that often. For me this is the first time I've seen it evem be used and I've been learning Japanese for a year now.
Hiragana is cursive kanji
Seeing Japanese Cursive For First Time is Just Like Seeing Another Language To Me 🙃
Every word is a letter. So need to remember all images.
It makes you appreciate the English language just little bit more after watching this video.
I didn't even know cursive Kanji existed 😆