Neater Japanese Handwriting in 10 Minutes a Day: What Changes First

Japanese children are taught the basics of neat handwriting at school, in a subject called shosha (書写). The national curriculum lists the points grade by grade. In grades 1 and 2: hold the pencil and sit properly, and pay attention to “how strokes meet and cross, and to their length and direction”. In grades 3 and 4: understand how characters are built from parts, and pay attention to “the size and arrangement of kanji and kana”. In grades 5 and 6: be aware of writing speed (Course of Study for Elementary Schools, 2017, in Japanese).

Adult learners usually skip this stage. You learn to read kana and kanji, perhaps to type them, and handwriting comes later, often from a textbook with small printed examples. The result is characters that are recognisable but look uneven, especially when kana and kanji sit side by side.

Ten minutes a day will not change everything. But some things change quickly once you pay attention to them, and this post goes through them in the order I think they appear.

First: the direction and length of each line

The first thing to improve is the individual line. Are the horizontals parallel? Do the verticals come straight down? Is the long stroke clearly longer than the short ones?

Much of what makes handwriting look messy is not the overall shape but lines that wander in direction and length. Characters with several horizontal strokes, such as 三, 言 or 書, look far tidier when the gaps between the horizontals are even and the longest one is obviously the longest. A common piece of advice is that horizontals look crisper if they rise very slightly to the right.

Anyone can keep lines straight if they write slowly. This is usually where the first ten minutes of attention show.

Second: size

The next thing is size. When a line of Japanese looks hard to read, the cause is often not the shape of any one character but the fact that they are all different sizes.

The curriculum mentions “the size of kanji and kana” for a reason. A common rule is to write kana slightly smaller than kanji. If you try to make a simple hiragana the same size as a kanji with ten or more strokes, the hiragana ends up looking oversized.

Third: the centre line

The third thing is the centre. Within each character, where does the vertical centre line run? When you write horizontally, are the characters the same height along the line? When you write vertically, do their centres stack on one straight line?

This is hard to practise with single characters. It shows when you write several in a row, such as your name or a short sentence.

Details come later

Stops, hooks and sweeping strokes (tome, hane and harai) are the part learners often worry about most. I think they can wait. A 2016 guideline from Japan’s Council for Cultural Affairs on the shapes of kanji says that handwritten forms vary, and that as long as a character’s basic framework is recognisable, small differences in detail should not be judged as mistakes (guideline page, summary from the Agency for Cultural Affairs, both in Japanese).

Being correct and being beautiful are different things. Still, good-looking handwriting starts with a sound framework. Once line direction, size and centre are under control, you will have attention to spare for the details.

Stroke order

For learners, stroke order deserves a mention of its own. The Japanese curriculum asks children in grades 1 and 2 to write “following the stroke order” as part of writing carefully, and I think that is right, mainly because the standard order is usually the order that keeps a character balanced. If you learnt some kana or kanji in your own order, it is worth relearning the ones whose shape suffers. Slow, careful repetitions in the correct order are where the new habit replaces the old one.

What to practise first

I think the best place to start is with what you write most.

• Hiragana. It appears in every sentence, so neater hiragana changes the look of everything you write.
• Your own name, in katakana or kanji, and words you use often, like the place you live or the subjects you study.
• The kanji in your current lesson. Practising them by hand while they are new helps you remember them as well as write them.

Starting from characters you actually use makes progress easier to notice, and easier to keep up.

How to use ten minutes

This is the routine I would suggest.

1. Two minutes of lines. A few horizontals, verticals and left-sweeping strokes, keeping the lengths even. This warms up the hand and the eye.
2. Five minutes of today’s characters, slowly. Look carefully at the model and write each stroke in order. This is not speed practice.
3. Three minutes at normal speed. Write a short sentence or your name at your usual pace, then compare it with the slow version. You will see where things fall apart.

The last three minutes matter most to me. If your characters are neat only when you write slowly, the handwriting other people see has not changed yet.

Keeping going, and seeing progress

How long it takes to notice an improvement varies from person to person, and I cannot give you a reliable number. What you can do is make progress easier to see.

The simplest way is to keep the same characters, dated. Day to day the difference is hard to spot, but side by side with a week or a month ago, the change in how your lines and sizes line up becomes clear. Fixing a time of day also helps. Ten minutes is short enough to fit into a set slot every day.

Practising with StudyX Smartpaper Letters

StudyX Smartpaper Letters is a tracing app for iPhone and iPad. You can write with a finger or with Apple Pencil.

You type whatever you want to practise into the search bar, so you can practise your name, a sentence from your lesson or a list of new kanji directly. It includes more than 10,000 characters, covering hiragana, katakana and kanji among others. The model draws itself one stroke at a time in the correct order, and you trace over it. You get a score after each character, and an average at the end.

The score measures how closely your lines overlap the model. It does not check stroke order or the shape of stops and hooks. So I would read it as a measure of how close your shape is to the model. As your lines, sizes and proportions settle, the score tends to reflect it. Since the app shows the stroke order but does not check it, following the animation each time is up to you.

Each string you practise is saved in the history with its average score and date, up to the most recent 20, and you can keep frequent words in a word list. That gives you the dated record described above without any paper. You can also toggle a dotted guide and slow down the model animation in settings.

It is a one-time purchase with no ads and no in-app purchases, and what you write is not sent anywhere.

For a first session, see Getting Started with StudyX Smartpaper Letters. For routines, see Tips for Practicing with StudyX Smartpaper Letters.