[xrd]

I didn't read the full text but I did notice that the authors are 75% Japanese names and one other person who I'm assuming is of Chinese heritage. It makes me think of all the Japanese art I've seen with calligraphy that is unreadable to me. I can read Japanese pretty well but artistically rendered characters are often so hard for me to grok. I would be fascinated to see this work applied in this way and I bet these authors could leverage their language skills in this adjacent way.

[seabass-labrax]

Nvidia wrote back in 2019 about a research team which was experimenting with machine learning for optical character recognition of historic Japanese writing. It looks like the author mentioned in the post now works for Google but still does some work in this area.

https://blogs.nvidia.com/blog/japanese-texts-ai/

[_a_a_a_]

"all the Japanese art I've seen with calligraphy that is unreadable to me"

I've heard from an Arabic speaker that that beautiful Arabic calligraphy also suffers from a lot of rearrangement to get the appearance, also making it difficult or impossible to read

[evertedsphere]

The situation with Chinese/Japanese calligraphy is much more like that which many English speakers have with reading untidy handwritten English (see doctor jokes) or idiosyncratic autographs or signatures.

How well can you write Japanese by hand, with correct stroke order? Doing that, in my experience, makes it a lot easier to understand 行書 — in the same way that knowing cursive makes reading untidy or artistic cursive easier — but 草書 does still take a lot of work. (I'm not there myself yet!)

[xrd]

I know the strokes well, or at least I did. I recall being corrected in class when I lived in Japan. I was so proud of my kanji and the strokes were completely out of order and my Japanese classmates made me well aware of that.

I'm actually building a way to practice the correct stroke order while reading Japanese classics.

For example, this passage from Natsume Soseki's Kokoro:

https://community.public.do/t/kokoro-by-natsume-soseki-parag...

If you click on the kanji section, you can click on any of the kanji and then a modal pops up with an animated kanji with correct stroke order and then a free draw canvas on the right.