Mega Mandarin Practical Cursive Flashcards

[大块头]

I hired a calligrapher and created an animated Anki flashcard deck for learning cursive Chinese. It's available for purchase here. Like my HSK 3.0 vocabulary deck (which financed this project), I will be donating 30% of all proceeds to UNICEF.

 

                     

[Xiao Kui]

There is a note on your website about decks working best with the desktop version of anki.  Do these work with android/ios versions as well?  I am interested regardless, but was curious since it's more convenient for me to have it on phone/ipad. 

 

Also, I know Stuart Jay Raj is currently doing a Youtube series on writing "like an adult" in Chinese and Japanese. Maybe this is a resource he or his students would be interested in.  I only watched the intro video on this, and didn't delve into the lessons yet.

[大块头]

38 minutes ago, Xiao Kui said:

There is a note on your website about decks working best with the desktop version of anki.  Do these work with android/ios versions as well?  I am interested regardless, but was curious since it's more convenient for me to have it on phone/ipad. 

 

I've confirmed everything works on the Android, Windows, and Linux (Ubuntu) Anki clients. It should work on Mac and iOS, but if that's not the case I'll refund your purchase.

 

45 minutes ago, Xiao Kui said:

Also, I know Stuart Jay Raj is currently doing a Youtube series on writing "like an adult" in Chinese and Japanese. Maybe this is a resource he or his students would be interested in.

 

Wow, thanks for letting me know! I'll reach out.

[Insectosaurus]

This truly seems like a wonderful deck. I can currently read 4500 characters, give or take, if they're written in printed or kaiti form, but not cursive. To fix this I started I began practicing writing the characters as well. That process is moving steadily forward and now I can write around 750 characters and will be finished with the 3500 most common characters sometime in late December.

 

To the guys more experienced in writing Chinese: would you in my position keep practicing the kaiti forms until I've nailed them down completely (have in mind that I can already read all of them), or would you just move over to this cursive deck instead, since it's cursive forms I can't read.

[黄有光]

Personally, I would want to be able to write at least the first 1000-2000 characters without issue, and then move on to cursive.  I just started learning 行书 yesterday and (1) it turns out calligraphy can reduce you to tears pretty quickly (joking! ...sort of) and (2) it's really difficult to internalize and correctly reproduce the cursive forms without directly tying them in your head to the corresponding 楷书 form, at least in my experience so far 

[Insectosaurus]

On 9/6/2021 at 10:40 AM, 黄有光 said:

it's really difficult to internalize and correctly reproduce the cursive forms without directly tying them in your head to the corresponding 楷书 form

 

This has been my main reason for first learning kaiti first. I'll await more comments before I make up my mind but what you write makes sense.

[黄有光]

Yeah! Like, I could NOT wrap my head around the cursive forms of 的 or 不 and correctly reproduce the forms until I stopped trying to directly copy the weird squiggles and instead internalize what each squiggle was capturing re: the original form. That helped SO MUCH. I picked up seven characters yesterday, and I am hoping to pick up seven more today. Here is a photo of my work so far. I would love to have input on what I've accomplished so far. I'm pretty proud of it -- this is the result of one study session -- but I am not at all satisfied with my rendition of 年, and 不 is really tricky for me to reproduce accurately every time.

 

Practice, practice, practice!

[大块头]

Replying to @alantin's comment here.

 

Quote

That looks really interesting!

I haven't practiced writing characters in a long time and have been waiting for inspiration to go back to it.
Learning to write in semi-cursive should be a good way to get a new angle to this and also learn a new and practical skill in the process.

 

Do you intend to extend the deck at some point? Do you think learning to write 1200 characters in in cursive can carry over to being able to write other characters too in the same style?

 

Thanks, I hope people find it useful.

 

Expanding the deck to include more characters would be a natural next step, but that will have to wait until enough new orders came in cover the cost of doing so. I've written code to streamline the animation process, but it's still about $1 per character if you consider all the costs.

 

I don't know if 1200 characters is enough to learn all of the 楷书 to 行书 simplification patterns, and there will always be exceptions to any rule you observe, but I think learning how to write the most common characters in 行书 form will make your handwriting look more mature if the 楷书 remainder isn't terrible.

 

[NinKenDo]

Dope, I ended up purchasing it together with your handwriting recognition deck. I recently wrote out a dialogue I performed in class and wash struck by the fact that even I thought my characters looked like a child had written them. They weren't totally terrible Kaiti, maybe a little wonky here and there. But seeing all those Kaiti written out in pen just evoked primary school in my mind for some reason. I guess because it reminded me of my handwriting before we learnt semi-cursive in school.

[alantin]

On 8/20/2021 at 7:43 PM, 大块头 said:

On 8/20/2021 at 6:57 PM, Xiao Kui said:

Also, I know Stuart Jay Raj is currently doing a Youtube series on writing "like an adult" in Chinese and Japanese. Maybe this is a resource he or his students would be interested in.

 

Wow, thanks for letting me know! I'll reach out.

Out of curiosity, did this lead to something?

[大块头]

On 9/27/2021 at 3:05 PM, alantin said:

Out of curiosity, did this lead to something?

 

I emailed him a couple times, but I'm afraid he never replied.

[大块头]

I've put together 临摹 practice sheets for tracing the characters (example). If you've previously purchased this deck you should have received an email with a free download link for that.

 

[alantin]

@大块头, awesome!
Exactly what I've been looking for lately!

[Xiao Kui]

I'm sorry nothing materialized with Stuart.  But I'm so excited about the worksheets. Plan to print some out today. Writing will help with muscle memory, otherwise I'll be grading most of the cards "Hard" indefinitely in Anki!

[alantin]

@大块头, Do you have any plans to extend the cursive deck and the practice sheets to cover more characters?

[大块头]

On 2/8/2022 at 3:54 PM, alantin said:

Do you have any plans to extend the cursive deck and the practice sheets to cover more characters?

 

Yes. I've been fiddling with some computer vision libraries, and I think I've figured out a way to generate each stroke order animation directly from video of the character being written, which is 75% cheaper than hiring a freelancer to perform the labor-intensive process I used previously. I hired a different calligrapher to film himself writing the 3000 HSK 3.0 characters, as well as traditional variants for ~1000 characters where the 行书 form differs from that used in mainland China. I just got the last batch of videos from the calligrapher on Sunday. Once I finish this expansion I'll offer it as a free update to everyone who has already purchased the deck.

 

I'm not precisely sure when that will happen because I need to prioritize finishing my PhD and getting what my wife endearingly calls a "real" job, but peddling these Anki decks has been a fun weekend diversion and I don't have any other weekend projects planned over the next few months.

[alantin]

That's awesome to hear!

 

I've been using the material for a couple of months now and seen great improvement! I'm getting quite ambitious about one day being able to write those 3k characters freely from memory. And actually with some style! ? By the way, the examples have gotten lots of endorsements from my tutors! ?

 

I actually personally found the practice sheets much better for practicing and I created my own HSK word deck for reviewing them in words. Too bad I could only create 2531 cards with the 1200 characters.

 

Really looking forward to the update! I should then be able to just add words pretty much at will to Anki and have animations for them right away. Though I'll have my practice cut out for me for quite a while with what I already have.

 

[大块头]

I'm almost finished processing all 3968 videos for the new expansion. There are still a couple things to do but a screen capture of the prototype card layout is below.

 

If I'm able to include all stroke animations in the deck as .webm videos that will result in a much smaller filesize (~1 GB) than animated gifs. Embedding video files isn't among Anki's documented features, however, so I need to test the prototype on a few different systems. I've confirmed that it works on Linux, Windows, and Android, but I don't have any Apple devices. If any iPhone or Mac users out there are willing to import the attached .apkg file to make sure it's rendered properly, I'd be happy to give them a copy of the final product once I finish putting it together.

 

Mega Mandarin cursive test.apkg

[大块头]

The expanded Anki deck with 3000 characters and 4200 stroke order animations is now available. If you purchased the previous iteration of this deck check your email for a 100% coupon.

 

The deck only currently only contains simplified characters. I have about 1000 animations for traditional versions of these characters, but I want to go over some of them with Taiwanese calligraphy-hobbyist friends first before I publish those.

 

[Tomsima]

Unbelievable job, well done for getting this resource together, indispensable for anyone learning handwriting, and I already recommend to students. Am I right in thinking you have replaced the character set by 程老师? is it for the reason of greater importance placed in on tracing the path of the pen easier rather than copying model characters? Either way this writer writes excellently as well!