書道 (calligraphy)

The Japanese language class of my first semester here at Todai ended this week. But we already had the final exam in the week before. The rest of the course our nice teachers did several activities with us. That included pronounciation training and reading comprehension, but also one class about the many cultural festivals that exists in Japan. And, to come to the point of this blog entry, one session of Japanese calligraphy or shodō (that is also how you read the two kanji in the blog's title. The dō is the same as e.g. in Judō).

It started with the teacher giving us a presentation about the different styles of calligraphy. She told us about three of them each one more difficult to do. Interestingly, the most advanced one is the most unreadable one and looks more like well, someone writing very fast and not caring so much about the readability of the text. Uhm, writing letters unreadable, looks like i can do that...

Anyways. We had already studied our first 110 kanji during our course, nevertheless the teacher had some examples of 'nice' kanji at the end of her presentation. So each one of us picked two that would make some kind of sense and started practising. To know what we're aiming for, our teacher wrote us a sample sheet of our kanji with red ink (actually, it was more orange than red) and we were copying that. Here's my 'master copy':

先生の書道

The two big kanji mean something like 'happiness' and 'travel'. Originally i wanted to write 'happy traveller' but that would've been too many kanji - more than two - and there was only space for two kanji on these sheet. So, 'happy travel' it was. Oh, and i usually don't write my name here in this blog, but if you can read it - the four small kanji on the left - well, good for you ;-)
Some more pics:

Practising. Next to me is a Nepalese friend of mine.

My final product compared to the teacher's one on the left.
Some Japanese friends told me that my name is 'no Japanese', well, i guess i managed to achieve the 'unreadable' Kanji style ;-)

 

 

Expert at work - a Chinese classmate, obviously knowing more about calligraphy

All of us incl.our teacher.

In the last pic you can see only about half of my language class. Most people didn't show up during the last two weeks because of exams etc. and the language class not being compulsory. Still, you can see six different nationalities in that pic. Hehe.

Well, that was fun :-)

Cheers.