Chinese Cursive Script: An Introduction to Handwriting in Chinese

by Fang YU Wang

In this useful volume, Fred Fang-yu Wang presents materials designed to help solve an often vexing problem for students of how to recognize and write handwritten or cursive-style forms of Chinese characters. Such forms are not usually taught in the regular language programs in schools and colleges. Yet they are constantly used by Chinese in informal communications, notes, letters, manuscripts, diaries, and the like. In fact, Chinese seldom write anything in printed-form characters, since cursive forms are generally employed for daily use. Such forms are as frequently seen in Chinese culture as the handwritten forms seen daily in the Western environment. A person unfamilar with the cursive forms will usually find it difficult to read handwritten Chinese despite a thorough knowledge of the printed form. Thus the value of this book. This book teaches students to recognize the cursive versions of 300 basic, frequently-used characters in Chinese, radical by radical. In doing so, it fills a crucial gap in the bridge between academic learning and real-life competence.

Genres: Reference

281 pages, Paperback

First published March 11, 1958

Reviews

[Immen]

Loved this! 20 lessons, 300 characters, starts with a "how to use this book" and ends with some very nicely structured tables and index. Each lesson except the first and last introduces 15 characters and gives example handwritten sentences of increasing length, and later quirky stories with a Seussian vocabulary. The first lesson introduces 30 characters; the last features a long reminiscence about leaving Beijing during the Japanese invasion, and then some short letters, written with a brush. The letters are extraordinarily banal and very beautiful. They're each accompanied by a 楷体 translation; everything else is left as an exercise to the reader, who is directed to consult the index if at a loss.

The book is from the 50s, so it doesn't use pinyin and it does use the feminine 他. Beijing is referred to as Beiping, the population of China is 400 million, and the story in lesson 10 is about how women are incapable of making good spending decisions -- but the script it teaches, "modern" 草书, dates to 400AD and is timelessly beautiful. This is such a thoughtfully written little textbook; the only thing I wish were updated is the bibliography, which refers exclusively to books already written in 1958. Anything good come out in the last 65 years?