I've been playing with the thought of acquiring a slightly more "proper"/authentic handwriting style, something that resembles the way Chinese people actually write. I don't have any interest in doing real 书法 and no real aspirations to go beyond 楷书 (although 行书 might be a worth a thought as well ...).

Anyone with experience in Chinese handwriting? Any recommendations, resources?

Thank you!

despite being quite good at writing Chinese (read: I know how to write) my handwriting sucks, just like my French/English sucks. I think this is something deep rooted in our brain, not sure we (I) can do anything about that :)

However, I realized that my Chinese handwriting could be quite "chinese" when I usual write fast with one or two strokes for the whole characters

Not really a lot of experience. My ideas would be - Google search for something like 硬笔书法 and watch some of the videos. E.g.

http://v.youku.com/v_show/id_XMTA0MzU2NjUy.html
http://www.56.com/u59/v_MzA2NTczMTI.html

I quite enjoyed some 草书 videos, just for the fun of trying to decipher the code and the explanations in Chinese of what they're doing.

Writing more: when I was handwriting essays for HSK my handwriting became a lot more natural and smooth. You end up reinventing some of the shortcuts in different calligraphy styles naturally.

Look at other people's handwriting, Google searches might help here to. E.g. http://tieba.baidu.com/f?kz=854943284 found via search for 手写文章.

If I were seriously going to work on my handwriting I'd probably get a book. The last time I was in Hong Kong I browsed through a bookstore and they had one or two nice looking books on handwriting style, I think maybe even in English but I can't really remember. I'm not really at the stage where handwriting's something I want to work on as a priority yet though. If I remember rightly 穆尔 you are living the life of a Chinese peasant farmer so may need to rely on internet rather than 新华.

Try also chinese-forums, I seem to remember they have some advice there.

I'm not sure that this is advice really, but it's my two cents worth :)

I have not been learning or writing for long, about a year, but when I have been practising my writing, a Chinese friend commented that it looks like a child's writing. The reason for that being that I carefully form each character, stroke by stroke, and make it look as close to a printed form of the letter. Looking at her writing, it is much more fluid and it takes a while (for me) to see what the character is.

The reason for this is very simple, I have been writing for a year, she's had a few years of writing every day and so has developed her own style and a fluidity that comes from doing something every day. On the positive side, her 9 year old son writes in a similar way to me and complains that he can't read her writing!

In short, the only way to write like a Chinese person is to do what they do and use it every day. If you read Chinese hand-writing then you will soon see the shortcuts that you are allowed to take and your handwriting will soon become more natural and 'more Chinese'.

感谢大家的回答。

Tortue; yes, I guess that's about the stage where I'm now.

ximeng; 没错儿，俺的村子里没啥这样的铺子，但山下有的是铺子。俺的村长也是个知识分子，蛮文绉绉的，改天去找他，看他的字咋样。

HappyBlue; 说得好. But Chinese students also have formal education in (cursive) handwriting, it's not all about intuition.

I don't know what they are called, but some of my Chinese friends here bought elementary looking character books for tracing. I flipped through and could write all of the characters so I asked why they would buy the books.

They told me it was to make their handwriting look more beautiful. After another look at the book I did notice the books had them tracing more fancy looking versions of simple characters.

Those books are called 字帖 and are intended for tracing，or 描写. These usually have names like "3500 常用字钢笔字帖“ and are generally written by well-known teachers of calligraphy. They come with tracing paper in the book but you'll want to buy some extra, called 描图纸 or 硫酸纸. As a side note 硫酸纸 might be more suitable for using with a pencil than a pen, though apparently pencils are considered good for writing practice so hey.

Short of finding someone to teach you (which would be an advisable step for getting started anyway, I regret not doing this when had the opportunity) this is basically the most reasonable way of going about things. Of course watching videos and any other teaching material you can find will be an invaluable aid, as the 字帖 books generally don't provide much basic instruction.

From what I have been told and personal experience, it's best to start learning 楷书 first rather than jumping into 行楷, otherwise you'll never really have the sufficient "功底" to ever write well.

The idea of learning to write more like a Chinese person brings up an interesting though - perhaps if you wrote more like a Chinese person, you'd finally learn how to decipher the crazy scrawl that is the typical Chinese person's handwriting. Personally, I have no interest in writing like that, since diminished readability doesn't seem like a good thing to me, but being able to read other people's scrawls would be nice.

My personal take on handwriting is the more I do it, the faster I can do it, and the more unique my handwriting looks. As long as I can maintain readability with those two things advancing, then I consider it a good job. As others have mentioned, unless you're interested in studying writing essentially as an art form rather than developing your handwriting naturally, the best thing you can do is just to write more. When I started learning written Chinese, it was the old pen and paper method, with a portable whiteboard thrown in from time to time, and while it wasn't the most efficient use of my study time, I certainly have better handwriting than I would if I had used Skritter for my entire time studying characters.

mcfarlj & digilypse; that sounds really interesting! What I do currently, is to partially imitate downloaded computer fonts (carefully selected) and handwriting samples. You always need to be extremely careful that you do not muddle together some ugly mixture of styles, so lots of instruction material and background information is essential. I hope to get some teacher feedback shortly.

FatDragon; I agree with much of what you say, apart from the sentence "unless you're interested in studying writing essentially as an art form rather than developing your handwriting naturally". It does, of course, improve naturally, but I also think it's important stay "conscious" over this development and acquire skills to check it.