BingoBoots

What are your MBTI types?

It's not a tumor.

Not a question but a pencil anecdote for David.

I teach English to children in Taiwan. I never liked mechanical pencils and I hate them even more now that I’ve seen them in the hands of my 7yo students. It takes the kids literal minutes to change out one lead, and of course they break it all the time. When they use regular pencils, the kids complain about their pencils not being sharp enough and they ask me for the class sharpener every 5 minutes. I thought why the hell are they so obsessed about the sharp pencils?

Then I started learning to write traditional Chinese characters and I understood. The strokes have to be accurate and I had to sharpen my pencil constantly. I don’t think 7yo kids are learning complex characters yet, but I know how strict Taiwanese teachers can be about the writing. So for beginners it helps to have a mechanical pencil, but for people who already know how to write in Chinese, I think the regular pencil looks wayyy better (it’s closer to the look of the brush pen used in calligraphy).

If you wanna go deep into the precision of Chinese character strokes (line thickness, width, height, direction, spacing…) or just look at some sweet-looking regular-pencil-handwritten Chinese characters go there: https://www.hackingchinese.com/handwriting-chinese-characters-the-minimum-requirements/

PS It’s 1am here and I stayed up just to ask you guys some questions. Love EPM, love the hosts, good night!

Thanks!