u/twbluenaxela
▲ 168 r/ChineseLanguage
Two years ago I picked up a brush and started learning 楷書 and 行書. I'm a Mexican American who moved to Taiwan six years ago. I've been studying Chinese for over a decade, immersed in the Chinese diaspora for close to ten years, and somewhere along the way Chinese culture stopped being something I was interested in and became something I lived inside of.
For me, learning calligraphy and building this tool is the final step of that journey. The thing that makes me feel truly integrated. Not just fluent, not just familiar, but genuinely connected to something thousands of years old.
There's something strange about calligraphy in Chinese-speaking countries. It's increasingly overlooked, yet somehow present everywhere you look: storefronts, temples, monuments, menus. It's hiding in plain sight, and most people walk past it without a second thought. I want to change that. I'm still figuring out how to inspire the next generation to look up and actually see it, but this tool is my first attempt at that.
And yes, I'm aware of the irony. Someone completely outside the culture wanting to come in and promote its rich heritage back to its own people. And to an international audience! It's a little crazy. But it just might help.
The thing nobody tells you about learning calligraphy is how much time you spend just trying to find decent references. You want to see how a specific character looks in 行書 versus 楷書, written by different masters across different centuries, and suddenly you're 45 minutes deep in broken websites and watermarked images with nothing to show for it.
So I built something to solve that for myself. 翰墨字典 lets you search any character and pull up historical examples across six script styles: 金文, 小篆, 隸書, 楷書, 行書, 草書, filtered by calligrapher or classical work. There's also a composition tool for building reference boards from historical examples and exporting them. Genuinely useful if you're curious about how characters have changed visually over thousands of years, even if you've never touched a brush. And my hope is that it will inspire you to look twice when seeing Chinese calligraphy, and even join me in participating in it by picking up a brush and going at it!
Free, no ads, open source. One person built it.
u/twbluenaxela — 17 days ago