What sort of writing utensil to use?

Question

I've been slowly learning my hiragana, and I ran into an unexpected dilemma.

The characters are hard to write.

I know, obvious perhaps. But this being the first alphabet I've learned outside of English, I hadn't really thought about how much practice it took as a young kid to perfect writing English letters with good form.

But even so, I feel like the flourishes in the characters, the fanciful weighting to the brush strokes, are near impossible to replicate with the ball-point pen I've been using, or with a pencil. Difficult to replicate with any sort of grace, anyway.

So is that normal? Do people in Japan write with pens/pencils and just leave out the elegant but non-essential shaping of the strokes?

Or do they use a different sort of writing utensil? Or, do they manage to pull off such flourishes with the same ordinary stuff we use?

Answer 1

You might want to take a look at this nifty combination of brush and pen called 筆ペン

Answer 2

ボールペン字 or just ペン字 should turn up practice sheets aimed at writing with pen rather than brush.

For example: http://ji.bdmj.net/hiragana.php (the squares are split into four with the dotted lines as a guide - correct stroke order will help, too).

A finer pen/mechanical pencil makes things easier when it comes to writing.

Answer 3

It's my understanding that kids in Japan do use brushes in school when learning how to write properly. I've seen they have these little brush-sets to put in their weird little backpacks. Then of course they use pens/pencils for most other occasions when they don't have a computer. (you're not writing cursive with a feather quill, are you?) Anyhow. with a pencil you may not get the full effect as though you had a brush, but there are certain methods to at least finish off a stroke: http://namakajiri.net/nikki/hiragana-stroke-ends/ (I haven't read this myself but it seems decent enough) These actually do make quite a difference. (though admittedly I'm lazy to learn these properly for every new kanji) Other than that, just practice.. I had tremendous problems getting の right, it always ended up looking like a weird swirl. But after just writing down answers to questions etc it eventually just started to look right.

Btw, this may be more of a meta-question..

Answer 4

From my personal experience, mechanical pencils work the best. Cheep ball-points are to be avoided like the plague, because they don't stand up well to the many short lines in Japanese. English has fewer, longer lines, so it give it more of a chance to get the ink rolling. (The exception to this is if you have a hard surface to put under your paper, so you're not writing on a stack of soft papers, like a notebook.) I like mechanical pencils because they're more often sharp, and if you're drawing kanji with high stroke counts, dull pencils mush everything together.

Sometimes I use an ink pen, but it's very fluid and it flows very well. It runs out of ink fast, but it's worth it. (Here, click on "GEL")

And, to get to the crux of your question, it just takes practice to get your handwriting looking closer to Japanese people's. If you're having trouble writing a specific kana or two, look up native handwriting samples and copy over and over...trying to mimic computer font will end up making your handwriting seem a little unnatural (which is what I did for the longest time...). Also, it might interest you to look at the stroke orders for the kana. It helped me to start writing the "crossbars" parts first, like for "お"