Maybe I’d be better off studying traditional characters…

So, recently I’ve been buckling down and writing an assload of characters daily. Once you know how to read and say a character you can already type it… and since I type Chinese far more often than I hand write it, my handwriting was becoming woefully deficient.

As I’ve been working to correct this, I find I have a much easier time remembering how to write complex characters as opposed to simple ones. This is even the case if the simple characters are things I learned ages ago. Take this for instance:

(感情) Let’s look at this little word. I have 感 down. I can write it without any issue. I struggled remembering the damn 情 more because I’d forget which “qing” it was (请, 清, 晴, 等等）. 摊 is another character I picked up and can write with ease and I had more problem remembering how to write 改, which for all intents and purposes is a ridiculously simple character. 丰富 is a word I always have issues writing from memory, whereas 翻译 I can do no prob. The traditional form of 罗 （羅） I learned one day almost 2 years ago to write my Chinese name one time. I NEVER studied or really practiced this character. I have written this character only a handful of times ever, and virtually never see it, but I can write it without any issue. I can also remember the traditional form of 让 (讓) quite easily, (Though in this case I can also write it’s simplified form, something my wrist thanks me for.) despite only ever seeing it at KTV and thinking it was crazy complicated and writing it a couple times out of masochism.

So seriously, what the hell? Does my brain like a challenge or something? I could fill pages with comparisons of some ridiculous character I can write easily compared to an easy one I can’t.

On the bright side, I can impress Chinese people on a pretty regular basis by writing a few crazy-complicated characters… on the downside for the life of me I can’t remember how to write the 经 in 经验 to save my life.