Sat, 11 Mar 2006
Japanese lessons
Oozy told me about Japanese lessons at the Faculty of Arts, and I have decided to enroll to the course with him. The course is taught by Mr. Koushi Hirayama, a native Japanese.
So far we are learning Hiragana, which I already know, but the lessons are nevertheless useful for me, because Hirayama-sensei also tells us what parts of the letters are more important than the others (something which cannot be learned just by looking at the Hiragana computer fonts).
The most tricky thing is the order of strokes. I thought it could be characterized as "left to right and top to bottom, with horizontal strokes before the vertical strokes which cross them". But alas, there are letters for which this rule does not work - for example も (MO, click to enlarge) is written with the long stroke first, and や (YA) has the shortest stroke written before the other vertical stroke. Does anybody know about a better-working (yet still simple) rule for determining the order of strokes in Hiragana?