Reddit reviews Chinese Calligraphy Made Easy: A Structured Course in Creating Beautiful Brush Lettering
We found 2 Reddit comments about Chinese Calligraphy Made Easy: A Structured Course in Creating Beautiful Brush Lettering. Here are the top ones, ranked by their Reddit score.
Based off of my own experience... see if you can find a physical shop instead. Ordering online is going to be somewhat iffy. Sets are almost always tourist traps with low-quality brushes and ink, made more to be seen than to be used. I would suggest buying the equipment separately and packaging them up yourself.
So! Actual stuff:
One thing's for sure - if your boyfriend isn't already learning the language, it will kick his ass, because the writing system is just so different. If he's not learning the language, he will also be limited to whatever words come in the instruction book, because it's not like in alphabets where if you know all 26/52 symbols you can write what you want. Each character is unique, and though there's a standard stroke order, you have to just be able to recognise the character in order to write it.
Learning Chinese calligraphy from written sources is going to be hard. If at all possible, see if your local area offers Chinese calligraphy classes for beginners. It really, really helps to have a teacher who can correct your brushwork. A lot of the expressiveness and beauty of Chinese calligraphy IMO comes from understanding what it is that you're writing, and how it should look proportionally, and these things are hard to understand just by reading.
I have Chinese Calligraphy Made Easy and like it. Get a Magic Cloth (or similar product) so you can practice with water and without wasting paper.
I will caution you: I have followed this method and still suck. A teacher would probably help, but I'm just not that serious. I console myself by remembering that I'm better than all but a small handful of non-Chinese people at it.