kenleewrites in 日本

In between typing today, I thought I’ll just give trackpad handwriting a go. It’s not enabled for Japanese inputs on Snow Leopard. If you want to use it or give it a whirl, you’ll have to enable chinese inputs. Although there’s a choice between traditional or simplified characters (traditional usually involves more strokes), if you intend to use this for writing Japanese kanji, go with traditional characters.

I spent a good 10 years studying mandarin in Singapore, but I haven’t really been diligent in practicing it since. I have always had some chinese friends to whom I speak to in mandarin, but that was about it. Well, that and the occasional book. The last book in mandarin I read was Tao de Ching (道德经). A good friend from Shanghai gave it to me as a souvenir. Reading (and comprehending) chinese philosophy text in itself was quite the experience!

Anyway, I guess what I wanted to say was that I haven’t been writing a great deal in chinese. To suddenly pick up the pen and write a full sentence is somewhat of a challenge for me now. You could say that I’m a little out of practice. I can read and type chinese, but write… that’s going to take a bit of time. Hopefully that will change soon. ^^. How about you?

This trackpad handwriting option is pretty nifty. Useful for looking up characters in the dictionary. ^^.