Japanese is my favourite written language, I love English but I'm definitely jealous of the beautiful glyphs and the vertical writing. From what I've seen, vertical writing is often poorly supported in software though, which is a shame.
That is quite beautiful. Thanks for sharing. Are you familiar with Japanese grass script? It has quite a different feel than the Mongolian, but it's a type of Japanese cursive that flows really nicely IMHO:
which is actually a fairly legible example. Admittedly, the more flowing styles that you see in old poetry and the like effectively require specialized training to read. Beautiful, though!
It does look nice. The letters still look discrete though which is beautiful in itself but different from what attracts me to cursive style hands like Arabic.
Haha can you read Japanese though? It's beautiful for sure and it even feels a little different when reading it as if you're, in a way, sorta sounding about pictures. But man is it a pain in the butt to learn!
Growing up speaking German and learning Japanese later, while spoken English, German etc can be easily as beautiful as spoken Japanese, I have to say there's a beauty in the Kanji/Hanzi writing system that just doesn't have an equivalent in our languages.
I started out learning Japanese because I liked Japanese culture like a lot of people and never was a "language guy", but at some point I just got addicted to learning kanji. When you can start to just guess what a Kanji means and you don't even know why that's such a satisfying experience.
Think of kanji not as characters but as words (because they literally are) and you will realize English and other Latin/European languages share the same trait.
You speak German and English, so you can probably appreciate that you can "generally" understand other European languages even if you don't speak them if they share a common root like Latin. Kanji is like that.
Same, kanji is also the hardest for me, I have a much easier time learning new words by sound/hearing. But, I know some people that are the complete opposite & can't learn enough kanji, ymmv
English had beautiful writing, but it was destroyed by technology. First by the printing press, then by typewriters, then by low-resolution computer monitors. All of the human character and calligraphic qualities of the script have been mechanically stripped away in order to better accommodate what are now outdated legacy technologies, but everyone is so used to the status quo that we don't even realize what we've lost, and instead just accept that English script happens to be uglier than Japanese or Arabic or Devangari. In an alternate universe, we could be reading this in a script reminiscent of, say, the Uncial script used in the Book of Kells (which is what inspired Tolkien's beautiful Tengwar script).
Alternatively, we've made things a lot more legible for people from different backgrounds to understand. Deciphering modern fonts is a lot easier than deciphering cursive script, and hand-writing complicated scripts just raises the barrier of entry for people to communicate in written form
Good traditional handwriting is not less legible. You're just not as used to it, or you have only seen bad examples (like handwritten letters written by older people with shaky hands, or poor spelling, or misaligned lines). If you spend a little time with it, it's just as easy to read as the block characters we use in digital media and print.
