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Whitman College

Japanese

Writing Japanese Beautifully

Date Awarded: April, 1999

Other Participants:
technical support personnel: David Sprunger

Project Goals and Objectives:

This project provided a tool to help students of Japanese learn how to write Japanese. The goal, however, was to introduce the Japanese writing system as a living script to be drawn and produced with care, skill, and feeling. We did not want students to consider written Japanese as a series of static symbols to memorize. That is, the sounds of Japanese, when written, represent a beautiful series of hand-drawn pictures. For this reason, we asked students to begin seeing the hiragana and katakana and kanji not as mechanically produced symbols, but as pictorial images that can be produced beautifully and well. Students were also to learn to appreciate good writing implements and develop a spirit or heart that senses the aesthetic qualities inherent in writing Japanese beautifully.

We devoted several days at different times to videotape all the hiragana and katakana as well as approximately 40 kanji. We will also spend the summer creating videotape lessons on the hiragana, scanning the hiragana script and generating a design for our first workbook. We will work on the text which will describe in detail how beautiful strokes are created and which will discuss strategies for practicing effectively.
Along with the workbook, we propose to create a series of video lessons that show students how the hiragana and katakana and kanji are written by a master calligrapher in real time. We want to show students how the calligrapher produces each stroke. We want them to appreciate how the hand holds the brush and how it allows the brush to work. We want students to see how the brush glides over the paper , both quickly and leisurely, as it produces an aesthetically pleasing character. Indeed, we want students to understand and to discover that learning how to write Japanese in this way will lead to a different kind of
pleasure. We want to provide some bridges which will help students see that learning Japanese is more than a verbal or mental art, it is a visual art as well.

Process:

We devoted several days at different times to videotape all the hiragana and katakana as well as approximately 40 kanji. In addition to creating video lessons on the hiragana, we scanned the hiragana script into a workbook which described in detail how beautiful strokes are created and how to practice effectively.

The series of video lessons show students how the hiragana and katakana and kanji are written by a master calligrapher in real time. We wanted to show students how the calligrapher produces each stroke, as it produces an aesthetically pleasing character. Indeed, we wanted students to understand and to discover that learning how to write Japanese in this way will lead to a different kind of pleasure. We wanted to provide some bridges which will help students see that learning Japanese is more than a verbal or mental art, it is a visual art as well.

Outcomes:

I am currently testing our initial workbook in my first year Japanese language class. I showed the videotapes of the hiragana in class and had students use the workbook to practice. The results have been gratifying. I believe that students feel good about learning not simply how to write the hiragana but how to write them well.

WA - video clip