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Comment by euske | Hacker News Reader

I tend to think that handwriting tells a lot about one's upbringing and educational backgrounds. I was born left-handed but my parents forced me to use the right hand to write letters (a common practice in Japan at the time). I always make an excuse for me being a terrible handwriter because of that. But hey, I can now write while eating! (I still use chopsticks with my left hand.) Anyway, there's a lot of characters (not pun intended) that one can learn from one's kanji writing, because its blocky shape tends to reveal how rigid you follow the right stroke order, etc.

And then I found that the handwriting by Chinese people is awesome. They're very stylish and it appears that they still treat kanji writing much like calligraphy in China, while in Japan we mostly treat them as blocks. I wonder what secret they teach to kids in their schools.

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> I was born left-handed but my parents forced me to use the right hand to write letters (a common practice in Japan at the time).

One hassle that Western left-handed writers have to deal with is avoiding smudging their just-written characters as their hands advance to the right. As traditional Japanese is written top-down and right-left, I would have thought lefties were at an advantage in that regard.

The individual characters are designed to be written left to right. It's much easier for a right-handed person to write them correctly: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stroke_order

your hand is not supposed to touch the paper. practice with a fountain pen

First time I'm hearing that. But even if it's true, right-handers don't care, because nobody will ever notice.

i managed to smudge the ink of the previous line regardless. the weight needs to be center so half the hand needs to balance half above the line you are writing. or you turn the paper. or ... there are so many different handstyles.

I'm also left-handed and have ugly handwriting. So does my left-handed sister. But my older right-handed brother has the most beautiful handwriting I've ever seen.

So I figured it was being left-handed that's the problem. Now my 10 year old, right-handed son's handwriting seems stuck at an even uglier stage than where my sister's or my own handwriting is.

ouf, me too. i changed my handwriting back to left handed on my first day at work. on my first holiday i wrote postcards for my mother and she wrote me back, how i could fix my handwriting. now i believe i am ambidextrous because both hands cause not much of an issue for me. only the left hand write somehow more intelligible. for me it looks all the same.

I have found two quirks related to international writing styles. The first, as you found, is that people from China tend to have very neat handwriting. The second, (which I don’t know is generalizable) is that my Eastern European coworkers invariably wrote in cursive script.

At least in Czechia, cursive was taught until very recently. These days kids mostly learn Comenia Script [1].

[1] - http://www.lencova.eu/cs/gal_ukazky_cs

Although Comenia Script was very hyped, it hasn't become very widespread. Last data I'm aware of gave percentage of schools using it at only 4 percents.

Because over here it is taught as a default script.

Yes, I figured as much! The interesting thing culturally is that in the US everyone is (was?) taught cursive script and is told it is very important to know, but somewhere around the age of 11-12 it is entirely dropped out of the curriculum and never mentioned again.

Handwriting in your weak hand isn't so hard, as long as you write mirror-imaged.

Interestingly, while learning Arabic (right to left language), a lot of us could then read/write English right to left without ever practicing it. One day a student started writing something in English on the board from right to left (by accident) and was several words in before anyone noticed.

yes, i started to make notes in german in hebrew script (with yiddish transliteration rules), because it is much easier as a left-handed person. in university i was doing some mirror writing, until a professor teased me.

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