Why is stroke order important?

[rajs20]

Hi,

Sorry if this is a noob question, but why does stroke order matter? It seems to me that a lot of the fuss about memorizing kanji could be avoided if I just made up my own stroke order... I mean, heck, even with English, when I draw a lowercase "t", sometimes I do the vertical first and then the horizontal, or vica versa. Maybe for some of the really difficult kanji, learning a set stroke order would be useful as a memory aid... But some kanji are really easy to remember, like 本 for example, so why bother?

Doomo arigatou gozaimasu!

Raj

[Glenn]

Here you go; I've compiled a list of posts and threads that address this issue. Some of them cover similar material, but I think they're pretty informative. Enjoy! :wave::balloon:

http://www.sf.airnet.ne.jp/~ts/japanese/message/message.cgi?thread=jpnFKADTKXZDV083Kvw.html
http://www.sf.airnet.ne.jp/~ts/japanese/message/jpnF00rQYODF00mKnA1.html
http://www.sf.airnet.ne.jp/~ts/japanese/message/jpnF0ENBywLF07s3Bhq.html
http://www.sf.airnet.ne.jp/~ts/japanese/message/jpnDwSsZiGcDwSSBIyT.html
http://www.sf.airnet.ne.jp/~ts/japanese/message/message.cgi?thread=jpnDwSsZiGcDwSSBIyT.html

[rajs20]

:cool: Thank you very much for taking the time to compile those great links, this oughta keep me busy for a while :)

[jt_]

Just to offer my personal opinion, the main reason that stroke order is important is because as get used to writing kanji and start writing faster (in semi-cursive style) if your stroke order is a mess than the wrong strokes will "flow" together, and your handwriting will become illegible.

Of course, if you've ever seen a native speaker's cursive handwriting, you might think it's pretty illegible in its own right, but to another Japanese, it would probably be perfectly readable. This is because the shortcuts taken in writing the character conform to rules that others would be understand, since they all learned the characters the same way. If you break those rules, you run the risk of ending up writing characters that will turn out looking like a jumbled mess to native speakers.

[okaeri_man]

the number of strokes is very important, mainly for looking up kanji. say you come across a kanji you've never seen before. if you can't read it, you need to know how many strokes there are.

here's an example: 機.

it looks pretty complicated no? counting the number of strokes is a piece of cake if you've practiced proper stroke order of basic kanji. at least that's what i think...

[Scrivener]

You need to understand not only stroke ORDER but also what each kind of stroke looks like (there are about 20 or so I think) before you can write kanji clearly. Once you get used to kanji, you can really tell when they have been written by people who don't know stroke order (like say artists for computer games or cartoons who use them in backgrounds). There are bits and pieces overlapping in strange ways, and strokes that don't exist, stuff like that. As OK_man says it also makes it possible to count strokes properly.

[Keiichi]

And it's important to be able to count strokes properly to be able to use a kanji dictionary, in which you have to look for radicals that are ordered by stroke counts.

Keiichi

:blush:

[rajs20]

Thanks a ton guys, it makes a lot of sense now! :relief:

I figure I won't worry about mastering stroke order to the point that I can hand-write Japanese quickly. But, at least I'll try to get a "feel" for how they are drawn and how to count stroke order, and at least memorize the radicals and some common patterns that appear in kanji.

[Glenn]

I found that learning the kana helped in being able to write kanji more fluently. You get a good feel of how the strokes are written without all of the complexity of kanji. The most strokes in found in any kana is six, and that's with dakuten (http://dictionary.goo.ne.jp/search.php?MT=%A4%C0%A4%AF%A4%C6%A4%F3&kind=&mode=0&jn.x=30&jn.y=2).

With the kanji, starting with writing the parts is helpful, because you learn them, and then you get to practice them by putting them together and forming the more complex kanji.

[J44xm]

:sorry: Just, er, ignore this ...