Click the "Customize" button next to your name below to start your personalized Buddy calligraphy artwork...
親友 is the Japanese way to say “best friend.”
The first character can mean “relative” or sometimes “parents.” The second character means “friend.” Think about the close relationship that Japanese people have with their parents and relatives, and this starts to mean “close friends.”
Some Japanese-English dictionaries also translate this as “bosom friend,” “old friend,” “intimate friend,” “buddy,” “crony” or “chum.”
Note that in Chinese, this means “relatives and friends.” It's a good meaning in Chinese, but it's not quite the same as “best friends.”
The following table may be helpful for those studying Chinese or Japanese...
Title | Characters | Romaji (Romanized Japanese) | Various forms of Romanized Chinese | |
Buddy | 布迪 | bù dí / bu4 di2 / bu di / budi | pu ti / puti | |
Buddy | バヂ | badi | ||
Best Friends Buddies | 親友 亲友 | shin yuu / shinyuu / shin yu | qīn yǒu / qin1 you3 / qin you / qinyou | ch`in yu / chinyu / chin yu |
In some entries above you will see that characters have different versions above and below a line. In these cases, the characters above the line are Traditional Chinese, while the ones below are Simplified Chinese. |
All of our calligraphy wall scrolls are handmade.
When the calligrapher finishes creating your artwork, it is taken to my art mounting workshop in Beijing where a wall scroll is made by hand from a combination of silk, rice paper, and wood.
After we create your wall scroll, it takes at least two weeks for air mail delivery from Beijing to you.
Allow a few weeks for delivery. Rush service speeds it up by a week or two for $10!
When you select your calligraphy, you'll be taken to another page where you can choose various custom options.
The wall scroll that Sandy is holding in this picture is a "large size"
single-character wall scroll.
We also offer custom wall scrolls in small, medium, and an even-larger jumbo size.
Professional calligraphers are getting to be hard to find these days.
Instead of drawing characters by hand, the new generation in China merely type roman letters into their computer keyboards and pick the character that they want from a list that pops up.
There is some fear that true Chinese calligraphy may become a lost art in the coming years. Many art institutes in China are now promoting calligraphy programs in hopes of keeping this unique form
of art alive.
Even with the teachings of a top-ranked calligrapher in China, my calligraphy will never be good enough to sell. I will leave that to the experts.
The same calligrapher who gave me those lessons also attracted a crowd of thousands and a TV crew as he created characters over 6-feet high. He happens to be ranked as one of the top 100 calligraphers in all of China. He is also one of very few that would actually attempt such a feat.
Some people may refer to this entry as Buddy Kanji, Buddy Characters, Buddy in Mandarin Chinese, Buddy Characters, Buddy in Chinese Writing, Buddy in Japanese Writing, Buddy in Asian Writing, Buddy Ideograms, Chinese Buddy symbols, Buddy Hieroglyphics, Buddy Glyphs, Buddy in Chinese Letters, Buddy Hanzi, Buddy in Japanese Kanji, Buddy Pictograms, Buddy in the Chinese Written-Language, or Buddy in the Japanese Written-Language.