Japanese 原稿用紙 (Japanese Writing Aides)

While writing my previous post on translating a simple hand written Japanese letter (here), I was chatting to a Japanese friend.  I mentioned that I found it very difficult to write in vertical Japanese writing style.  My friend told me that I should not worry and that I would soon get used to writing in the vertical style.

I have no doubt that this will turn out to be true.  To prove the point my friend mentioned that Japanese have their equivalent of lined practice writing paper, which they use to practice their vertical writing skills.

Update: There sheets can also be used college students and various other purposes.

These writing sheets are called 原稿用紙[げんこうようし/genkouyoushi]. See picture below.

Japanese Children's Vertical Writing Practice Sheets - Genkou Youshi

With these sheets you start writing from the extreme righthand topmost position and characters get written down the sheet and then you move leftward by one column and repeat the process.

If you want to practice writing using 原稿用紙 then the link below has various examples and formats that you can download in pdf format.

http://www.sousakuba.com/genkouyousi/

It should probably have been obvious to me that the Japanese would have their own methods of helping themselves practice writing and keep things formatted, just as we in England do with Lined Notebooks for horizontal writing practice.

They also support horizontal writing though they are generally used for vertical writing.  They allow writers to practice the writing of Hiragana, Katakana and Kanji, depending on the format used.

They will certainly be useful to me when I get around to doing some writing practice.

If you wish to get more information on 原稿用紙 see the Wikipedia link below.

https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Genkou Youshi

This was a short post but, I thought that it would be useful to highlight these sheets.

My writing is so bad that personally I need all the help that it is possible to avail myself of!

Catch you next time.