How to Read Chinese Handwriting & Cursive

We now have a whole online course to teach you Chinese cursive! Sign up here: https://www.outlier-linguistics.com/p...

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If it hasn't happened to you yet, it will. Your friend or family member knows you're learning Chinese, and they give you something and ask you to read it. Or you're at a museum and you see a scroll with Chinese calligraphy, and someone asks you what it says. Or a native speaker friend writes something down for you.

But it's written in cursive! You can't read cursive!

"Oh, I thought you knew Chinese." Oof. Talk about a punch to the gut.

In this livestream, I'm going to talk about how to learn to read Chinese handwriting. Whether you want to learn to read your friends' notes, or famous calligraphic works in cursive, there will be something for everyone in this week's episode. Reading handwriting is a separate skill from reading neatly printed books, but it's not nearly as hard as it may seem.

There are some really outstanding books available to help you learn, too! I'm going to give recommendations for books both in English and in Chinese, as well as a classic poem used to teach cursive.

Book/resource recommendations:

Fred Fang-yu Wang's Introduction to Chinese Cursive Script (aka Chinese Cursive Script: An Introduction to Handwriting in Chinese)
Chang Yi-nan’s Read About China in Cursive Script
Chang Yi-nan’s Introduction to Chinese Letters in Cursive Script

Those two by Chang Yi-nan are out of print, but you can find PDFs online:

Read About China in Cursive Script: https://ia902804.us.archive.org/21/it...
Introduction to Chinese Letters in Cursive Script: https://ia600501.us.archive.org/11/it...

Johan Björkstén's Learn to Write Chinese Characters

石梁《草字彙》
李靜《草書字典》
http://www.shufazidian.com/
以观书法 (iOS app)

胡紫桂《草书历代书论选》
胡紫桂《草书历代小品文选》
《智永真草千字文》
王羲之《十七帖》

杜忠誥《書道技法1·2·3》
潘善助《行草技法教程》
余雪曼原《行書入門》
余雪曼原《草書入門》
洪丕谟《看懂中国书法》
王羲之《草訣歌》
苏门改编《草诀——草书书写与辨识》

韓道亨《草訣歌》 online version (this is awesome): http://www3.nccu.edu.tw/~ller/f3/f3e.htm

I made an Anki deck of that last one, but I'm not sure about copyright so I won't post it here. It should be pretty easy to make one yourself from that site though!