Hand-Eye-Brain Disconnect When Learning to Write?

[Chief123]

I recently decided I'm never going to get to where I need to without learning to read more and start writing.

I thought that starting with the "BOPOMOFO" symbols would be good to help me get used to the various strokes and would be an easy way to start since I can read it and have been able to for years.

However a weird thing happened when I first started. There was like this disconnect or something - the symbols I've known for almost 20 years didn't even look right when I wrote them. It wasn't that the writing was bad it was like I wrote the symbol but didn't immediately recognize it or something. It's very hard to explain.

It was like it was all the sudden so foreign to me - the writing of what I've been able to read for years.

I can't explain. Anyone ever heard of anything like this or experienced it yourself?

Of course it didn't help that I started and then immediately had my plans and life change with some personal things so I haven't picked it back up yet. It'll be interesting to see if the "disconnect" gets better or not.

Mark

[Hofmann]

Well, I've been able to read them for a long time, but never really tried to write them. So after reading your post, I tried writing them.

They definitely feel weird. There are kaishu-like strokes in them, but structurally, they are weird. For example, I want to write ㄅ as 勹 (as those two strokes are rarely connected in kaishu), I want to write ㇏ at then end of ㄆ, ㄨ, ㄡ. I accidentally hooked at the end of ㄘ, and wanted to at the second stroke of ㄞ and ㄦ, I wanted to make a corner at the third stroke of ㄝ, like in 世, because in kaishu, such things can either be hooked at the end or with a corner. ㄛ and ㄜ just feel bizarre.

But if you've never learned to read or write Chinese, you might not get the same feeling I get. However, I have a recommendation, and that is not to use bopomofo symbols as a stepping stone to Chinese characters. While they do use a lot of kaishu strokes, there are a lot missing and some compound strokes that never occur (like ㄅ and the second stroke in ㄛ and ㄜ). Furthermore, they are so different from Chinese characters structurally that they might distract you from learning Chinese characters.

Instead, I suggest starting out with Chinese characters with few strokes, such as the numbers 一 to 十, pictograms such as 人 and 木, common characters like 之 and 也, etc.

[來撒母耳]

I know the feeling, though I am a beginner, when I write a character for the first time it will usually feel weird, and then there are other characters like 有 which I have tried to write many times, that just feel funky I think it's the proportions that I'm not getting right. a couple things that have kind of helped are practice sheets with grid layout, and just trying to concentrate on the character and letting my wrist be as fluid as possible.