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I often get my lunch from a place run by Koreans and once a week or so I go to the Chinese takeout up the street from the Koreans. In both places they write your order in Korean or Chinese with a pencil or ballpoint pen, although both Chinese and Korean have, properly, thick and thin strokes. But then, with the limited vocabulary they need to write a lunch order, maybe it doesn't matter.
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Carpal Tunnel
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There are actually two sorts of writing combined by Koreans. They have a phonetic alphabet called Hangul which is written without regard to the thickness of pen strokes and they use a number of Chinese characters, intermixed with the Hangul words, where stroke thickness matters. My guess is that the average Korean noting an order in a restaurant writes entirely in Hangul.
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where stroke thickness matters
Sorry, but I've looked at quite a bit of both written and printed Japanese and Chinese, and stroke thickness has nothing to do with comprehensibility, but rather number and position of strokes. The thickness of strokes is more like the serifs on Times Roman. Mere ornamentation. In fact, if you look at the older Chinese characters, which were carved on stone and bronze, they are completely lacking in the thickness and little serif like doodads.
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Carpal Tunnel
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Gosh. All of those hours spent sitting in an uncomfortable position, holding the brush just the way Kim Son-Sang-Nim taught me, thinking that I was doing something important by paying attention to what my master told me about the thickness of my strokes ... and I was wrong.
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Carpal Tunnel
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Probably the thickness of the strokes is important only to the esthetics of the writing and has nothing to do with the meaning.
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Probably the thickness of the strokes is important only to the esthetics of the writing and has nothing to do with the meaning.
That's pretty much how I see it. Aesthetics can be important, but usually not for semantics. Language is a messy thang. One thing that Chinese do sometimes when discussing characters is to "draw" them in the palm of their hand with their index finger. (Heck, I've done it myself with success.) It's the order, number, and position of the strokes that's important in that case.
Another "myth" about Chinese is that it cannot really be represented by some kind of phonemic writing system, like pinyin. This is just so much poppycock. When speaking Chinese there is usually no recourse to characters; in fact, there are—gasp—illiterate Chinese who speak the language daily.
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