Review of Jitsuyō fudepen kofude ji shoho no shoho by David Chien

Brush examples of writing Japanese characters in both single characters and in running script. Filled with examples, strokes given for a few pages of characters, what to look for and how to write balanced characters given. Overview of brush writing & picking the proper brushes & tools. Examples of Kanji written on cards & letters.

Opinion: Interesting for the examples of running brush kanji just for reference. Otherwise, medicore in the Chinese Kanji characters throughout, with only a handful of example character written with enough life to be worth publishing.

Nasty habit of using too much pressure on many characters resulting in fat brush syndrome throughout the book. eg. with the character for rice field, the outer box is written extremely heavily vs. the cross in the middle. Running script is a bit better because he doesn't have as much dilly-dally time to drag the brush and let the ink sink in. A bit more life to the characters than the book above, lending the entire book some life, but both books are -lame- examples of correctly written Kanji ala Chinese style.

Limp examples will kill the chances of a student picking up good habits and calligraphy skills in both books, and any learner would be far better off running to a chinese book store to pickup the standard character practice pads for brush than these.

☆ See all reviews by David Chien.