julian/blog

All posts in the category ‘85-392′ are for my Human Expertise class.

The skill I have chosen to learn is writing Chinese characters. In my initial assessment, I wrote out the 8 basic strokes. I have absolutely no practice with any of these strokes except for one of them, so I doubt I even wrote them the correct way.

In the book I am using, Learn to Write Chinese Characters by Johan Björkstén, the author mentions that calligraphers typically consider the 8 basic strokes to be those from the character 永. He also has a graphic indicating each of those strokes. I will scan that graphic and add it to this post.

Here are my initial attempts (which I’m sure are quite wrong):

One thing to note is that these assessments should in theory be testing transfer at least a little bit. I will be practicing using fountain pens—this will make it easier for me to see my mistakes and see how well I’m making the strokes. When I input things using my graphics tablet, it’s not really like a fountain pen. That’s not entirely transfer, but it’s not entirely the same as my practice conditions.

This will not be my only assessment, but it is currently the only one I’ve fully formulated.

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