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From my googling it looks like it's called "sumi-e". I have received a gift of a beginner's sumi-e kit, and I'd like to know about how to do it right, or as correctly as it gets anyway. Could it be a good way to practice or learn kanji/hiragana/katakana? How should I approach that? My Japanese is lovely as hell already and I had been planning on hitting the books, but I don't really know what's what.
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Jan 7, 2017 08:28
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| # ? Apr 29, 2024 09:28 |
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I'm far from a great calligrapher and I always did more Chinese than Japanese, but I know a little and I'll try to help : Sumi e isn't calligraphy, it's a style of painting/a kind of ink (I think, see the above being better at Chinese). Calligraphy in Japanese is shodoo (書道). As to helping with kanji... That's kind of a mixed bag. It helped my Chinese character knowledge a bunch, but in Chinese a lot of the time there's a phonetic, while in Japanese it's just totally opaque a lot of the time what characters are made out of. (e.g. why the hell does 犬, "dog", plus 苗, "corn" get you 猫, "cat"? Because in Chinese "cat" and "corn" sound a lot alike and cats and dogs are both small furry animals. In Japanese this is totally lost.) However, if you're practicing writing a lot, that's still practicing so I doubt it'll hurt. I'll see if I can find something online later, but the first step would be to get a good grounding on the basic strokes everything is made out of, like the dot, horizontal line, vertical line, etc. When I was learning calligraphy in Taiwan they had us do this by writing 永, "permanence", over and over and over and over... Because it contains all of the basic strokes and is just over-all a cool character. The next step that I found helpful is to get yourself a good radical index (Here's a wiki page to get you started.), and then just go through that bastard and copy it a billion times. Here I wouldn't actually recommend you use your fancy new kit. I'd actually just buy a cheap brush pen because you're going to be using this a lot. What really, really helped me was that I'd just write it out constantly to keep my hands busy ; basically, when I normally would've been like doodling in class or whatever, I was practicing calligraphy instead. Not gonna say it made me some master calligrapher or anything (cause I'm definitely not), but I do at least get a lot of compliments on my handwriting in Chinese. PS Graph paper is the greatest god drat thing ever for this ; graph paper is your friend now. The added bonus to the above, that I'm hoping will help you with kanji in general, is once you have all the radicals memorized it gets easier to remember them. Because now they're not weird squiggles, they're known sub-parts. (e.g. so like 猫 above you start thinking about it as "dog" and "grass" and "rice paddy") Hopefully that helps maybe? You should probably also check out if there are any introductory classes in your area.
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Jan 7, 2017 21:20
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