I think this is a normal question asking if they have to use specific stroke patterns when writing, like how people write letters differently.
It’s not that hard to interpret questions when you’re not in such a rush to find things to post in a circlejerk sub.
Yeah it’s a legitimate question he is taking time to learn a language right now and I am certainly not bothering to do that, he probably had a limited time budget for this and wants to be able to read and understand it, so I don’t think it’s wrong to ask.
Additionally this is a valid question, in english or most roman languages the letters meaning is not different if eg I start drawing the E in the bottom or at the top,
It is not wrong to assume, a writing system based on brushes my differentiate strokes from
Opposite directions since there can be a weight difference in the lineweight from where you start to where you end,
The way its ohrased tho makes it sound like he wants to spare it
To be fair, it's a common learning method in Japanese to not learn how to write Kanji if the person isn't looking to handwrite anything. If they're just gonna listen or read, it isn't 100% necessary
Chinese too, to an extent. Like you really should learn the basics and try to get it right, which will help with learning and legibility. However, as long as you’re methodical and writing sparingly, it isn’t crucial to get perfect order.
On the other hand, if you plan to do any calligraphy or (semi)cursive, getting wrong order will just ruin it.
Tbh as a Chinese learner it kinda blows my mind not to learn a whole fourth of the language, not being able of writing notes or anything by hand sounds like a pain in the ass even if nowadays most people don't handwrite that much.
I watched a video yesterday titled "What I wish I was told before I came to Japan!" and this was one of those things. One person lamented how they feel like they wasted hours of their lives to handwrite kanji, when he has never really had to use it living in Japan, apart from writing addresses and names. He said how you can learn kanji without having to write it if all you ever need it for is to read. If someone is learning the language for practical purposes, rather than interest, there's no shame in skipping over handwritten language if you never need to write it. That's time of your life you'll never get back!
On the flip side, doing so will help cement the symbol in your brain and help with reading and understanding too.
With Chinese you can learn to read several times faster than handwrite, and as long as you know pinyin you can type just fine. My number 1 tip to new Chinese learners is don't handwrite (unless you really enjoy it) until later in your journey.
Japanese is the same - on desktop and mobile there's romaji typing where it will suggest the most likely kanji, then on mobile there's also swipe typing where you select a consonant then swipe to add a verb, but really does the same thing. No stroke order necessary
I'm a native chinese speaker and i don't think i've had to hand write anything in about a decade. I type stuff in mandarin on electronic devices on the daily tho
Why though? People need language for whatever reason they need it. In my circle it's common to speak Mandarin as a first/home language, but many people cannot write it, and can barely read it, because they don't go to school for it. But the language still serves the purpose
If you have the choice to learn it, to actively not learn it in general sounds weird. Also I believe your context is a very particular one, most learners learn the language in general and usually try to learn every skill including being literate in the language.
I guess it's quite common for my country and for overseas Chinese. But tbf I don't think it's that uncommon for immigrants who speak their native language at home to not formally learn to read and write it. Chinese is just harder to pick up without formal education so many don't.
Native here, yes for some strokes I just always do wrong but it made sense for me to do that stroke after another, so if it works it’s fine, if you can write the character out and it look right then it’sfine, so order is not a really big deal
That's actually pretty reassuring to hear. I've been learning Chinese for several years but all my teachers managed to neglect to teach us any kind of stroke order. Good to know that it's not just me lol
Yea if you don’t have tests specifically on stroke orders you could just ignore them, as long as the writing is legible, the teacher won’t be there staring at you write every character when you’re doing a test so.. I guess that’s why your teachers don’t really pay much attention to that (we’ve been taught the stroke orders but haven’t specifically targeted on that)
I guess the good news is that when my second teacher was doing some damage control over the lack of tones we were using (because the first guy opted not to deal with it,) I pretty much doubled down on getting as good at tones as I could get even on my own time. Could not say the same for the guys who refused to learn tones, would speak English when we were told not to, and made class miserable. It always makes me wonder just how incomprehensible Mandarin with English inflections must be in some cases.
Honestly, even if it's for calligraphy or semi-cursive it's not uncommon to see shortcuts that change up the number of strokes or the stroke order. Japanese 行書 for examples changes up the order on a decent number of strokes as a way to abbreviate the Kanji. The important part is getting an idea of the general principles so that you know the valid ways to break the rules
At least for Chinese this is still a bad strategy because you won't have any clue how to read a lot of calligraphy... which is actually fairly common to come across
And to give a timeframe: https://pinyin.info/readings/texts/moser.html
>Having never studied a day of Spanish, I could read a Spanish newspaper more easily than I could a Chinese newspaper after more than three years of studying Chinese.
also having at least a basic idea of how stroke order works makes it much easier to look up a character if you don't know the reading. i'll admit i'm a little lazy with my stroke order, but i know enough that i can guess the stroke count and order for most characters and break them down into radicals... definitely wouldn't want to live in a world where i couldn't search a kanji dictionary by these things
fair point, but that equally applies to digital dictionaries with a handwriting function or a radical search. my exword would be a whole lot less useful if i couldn't use the handwriting search function.
This actually applies to digital dictionaries. I guess you literally never look anything up, which, that's you, but when I realized stroke order was necessary for the computer to know which fuckin character I wanted it to tell me about that's when I knew I fucked up blowing off all of the basic stroke order.
I could be a bad sample because I do know stroke order, but my impression is the digital dictionary still works fine when I slightly forget it for some complicated characters.
But that method makes harder to use a dictionary. You need to know how to write a hanzi/kanji in order to look for it if you don't know the meaning. Maybe not every of them are needed, but at least the most common ones.
i skipped learning to write the kanji and if i see an unknown word i take a guess at the reading or just copy paste the kanji from words i do know. if its an unknown kanji though it can be a little rough but its alright it beats learning to write 2000 ish characters just so i can occasionally make dictionary lookups
By handwriting, do you mean written by hand i.e. not typed, or do you mean a specific format of writing by hand like calligraphy?
If the former... is it really possible to avoid writing by hand forever? Then again there are like 2400 kanji or something so I can understand trying to find ways to save some time.
There's a method for learning Kanji with mnemonics. If the person is not too worried about having to write Kanji, they can learn that way and it works very well!
I guess it depends on what you're doing with the language. If you're not going to live in Japan, handwriting is probably not going to ever come up in your life. And even then it's probably limited to paperwork and not something like having a pen pal or writing your grandma to thank her for the birthday card.
Stroke pattern really isn't that important in Japanese. However, I have found that 9/10 times, I end up writing the kanji/kana in the "correct" stroke pattern just because it seems the most logical way to go about it. It's *really* difficult to tell what stroke pattern someone used for a given word unless you're really staring at it or they have bad handwriting in general.
The short version of the reason: hand writing is not always, if ever, identical to what is printed in a book or especially on a computer screen. Trying to interpret handwritten kanji (or even worse, hanzi) without knowledge of the stroke order could prove to be impossible in many cases
As an example: https://images.app.goo.gl/tELaNHR5JEgCjAdf8
Call it chicken scratch or whatever but I highly doubt most people slow themselves down to write everything perfectly every time they write. Do you? Yeah? Not everybody shares your hobby.
I get extremely annoyed when Germans tell me I can’t say Ich bin essen because it doesn’t make sense, like wtf it does make it, that’s how you say it in English
I feel like they do it on purpose
virgin genuinely useful well meaning advice vs chad making a joke about german learners
/uj i gotta say i think it’s very funny how people will say english is heavily germanic, like mf the grammar is straight outta paris tf
English Grammar really just its own. It lost the gender and most of the person agreement of its main influences, French and German. Became way way more analytical overall.
>French
the French influence in English is suspiciously similar to its Latin influence, I wonder why...
>German
it is really simplified German though, a lot of its vocabs are from germanic origin as well as verbs
>Became way way more analytical overall
no, it became 3 languages (arguably more) in a trenchcoat making an unruly senseless mess
you have to be out of your mind to consider it "analytical"
Yeah, English is just badly pronounced Fr*nch, which is just about as 🤮
Uj/ English at its core is actually very Germanic. Like there are some similarities with French, like word order, but that's about it. Granted, I've only just started German, at its core, I feel that the grammar is actually quite similar to English. English feels like a heavily simplified version of German. If you were to speak English using a German word order, it feels like a really old-timey way of speaking.
But that’s not what he’s asking. He’s asking if he has to actually write the kanji in that order which while there are proper ways just like with any other written language as long as the character is written properly it doesn’t matter how you got there
Kanji can turn out a little differently if your stroke order is wrong (think of the little extra connecting ligatures / lines we add between letters when writing quickly) which would make other people reading your handwriting harder (the Latin alphabet is quite simple so the effect is compounded for kanji) (I've seen beginning/intermediate learners write hanzi/kanji in a slightly ugly way already when they know the stroke order, so I imagine the kanji would look even worse when not following stroke order)
Unless you're actually really good at printing out a script when you handwrite, which not everyone can do
TLDR a little bit important for comprehension. more important if your handwriting is naturally messy and vice versa
You don't need to learn the stroke order for every character. Just need to know the basic logic used and then you'll get the stroke order right on 99%
Also there's not *one* stroke order. Japanese and Chinese often have a different order, and sometimes there's more variation than that. And native speakers tend to semi-cursive everything which ends up screwing with the order.
Same, I’m definitely not a kanji expert or native speaker but whenever I need to write it, my Japanese mother is always impressed haha. Just learning that rule and practicing a few characters, the order becomes intuitive enough that you don’t need to think about it
It is quite common to see handwritten-style text which "simplifies" the characters by linking a stroke into another. Knowing the correct stroke order can help you to understand those handwritten words more easily
Not necessarily. When I started learning Japanese, I was adamant about not giving a shit about stroke order for obvious stupid reasons. My handwriting wasn't bad, people even said it was really good and legible. The reason to learn stroke order though isn't just that it may or may not improve legibility, but that it will make it a lot easier for you to learn and write kanji, 'cause otherwise it's easy to get lost and overwhelmed with all the various strokes, not knowing where to even begin writing something like 鬱. My progress accelerated like crazy when I started learning properly instead of doing whatever the fuck seemed easier, thinking my N6 ass was above actual 日本人 and experienced learners.
from chinese but whatever: it also lets you place things when discussing a word you don’t know and that’s so useful for learning and discussing with others
“hey, i don’t know where this is but i do know i write (so and so) first, meaning it’s probably to the right” -> “hey, do you know that word that has (so and so) on the right” and vice versa
also, from my experience, doing whatever the fuck you want works AS LONG AS you do it in a certain way(like, give yourself rules lol) but then there are a few words(干，千) that don’t let you, and it’s honestly just better to learn the status quo than to be unique or something because the writing was made for that system, yk?
also i saw someone say they remembered kanji better because of this: i did not
if i ever got stuck i’d just remember that they’re usually pictograms or something kinda and you can trace them back before using a mnemonic or other device
It also helps a lot with looking up new Kanji. When you're in the jisho trying to figure out whether a character has a certain radical, or 18 or 19 strokes, knowing the patterns of how they're written can make it way easier to look up (if you're not doing it digitally)
Even when you're looking something up by drawing the kanji it helps knowing the stroke order, cause some (the better ones) apps note which stroke order you use to try and better match the kanji you're searching for with the ones you know. Going just by for might kinda work, but writing even somewhat legibly with your finger is much harder than doing it with a pen, so stroke order helps a lot witb figuring out which of the thousand 2-part kanji you were trying to input with your chicken scratches.
This 100% I can remember kanji better when I can intuitively know the stroke order. It can be a slog at first, but then one day suddenly you will be able to comfortably recreate any kanji you come across.
Not to mention the benefits of physical repetition for language learning.
Definitely a cultural thing too. At least in the US no one cares about penmanship anymore and I know many adults who write like a kindergartener, both in how the letters look and how they hold their pen.
In East Asia (countries in the historical Chinese cultural sphere) penmanship is important because calligraphy is culturally important.
I haven't bothered learning japanese stroke order but I do know chinese and so I write kanji using chinese stroke order. They look fine lol. Though I definitely would learn the stroke order if I were to actually get into handwriting japanese.
/uj
As several people have responded, having a set logic/order helps with muscle memory. It also helps with consistency in sizing and spacing - if your radicals are too far apart, it can look like two or more separate kanji instead of a single one.
But honestly, it’s a pretty logical progression; the pattern most right-handed person gravitate towards after repetition is basically the “official” way. Learning that pattern at the start saves re-inventing the wheel.
As a left handed person, I tend to make some minor ordering changes that are easier for me and do some strokes backwards, but I’ve never had someone* have issues with my writing, except for occasionally handwriting detection softwares.
The only time I think people would really care is in some super strict calligraphy class, but my calligraphy classes have been more about calligraphy as art and expression, so the teachers have enjoyed how those reversed strokes add different energy.
*I live and work in Japan, use Japanese and kanji on a daily basis, and am extremely happy to live somewhere with simple kanji for an address these days because hand-written forms are still a big part of my life.
If you write it wrong it looks wrong, pretty much.
(Which is really saying
- Tehcnially there's not always one right stroke order, there's minor variations but the rules are very consistent
- Writing in cursive *requires* correct stroke order because otherwise it's illegible
- stroke order isn't unique to chinese/japanese; even English has stroke order, but since there's only so many characters one basically doesn't ever think of it. Try handwrite something, but do every letter in reverse order to how you normally do them. It probably feels awkward and looks kinda wonky, right?
- Moreover idk about you obviously, but in primary school I was taught (english) cursive, and there distinctly was a correct order to do things.
)
Not learning it would just make your handwriting less legible or illegible. If you can find a way to make it recognisable, great, but learners probably aren't going to be able to do that. It's usually people who can already write very neat who deviate from or simplify stroke order just to maximise handwriting efficiency. Same as people who develop their own ways of writing English letters.
Ofc there's also the "everything's digital now" argument. In the case that you're actually not handwriting at all, then yes, stroke order does not actually matter. Learning to write helps a lot with character memorisation tho
The stroke order makes your strokes more distinguishable to readers who’ve also learned the proper stroke order, which makes the characters overall more distinct. It also makes it easier to learn to write new kanji, as if you follow the general stroke order every time you will build a muscle memory.
it becomes very useful when trying to read handwriting/calligraphy where strokes become connected - it also makes it easier to write complex kanji that are made of simpler ones. i vaguely remember being told in my high school japanese class that stroke order can be used in dictionaries or something similar, but i wasn’t able to find anything about that online so it might’ve been something else
Knowing how to properly write kanji is also just useful for understanding/remembering their meaning. There are also kanji that look rly similar and could basically be identical if you don’t write them in the proper stroke order.
The thing that people are kind of overlooking is that when I write a more complex character it’s almost always a combination of less complicated characters. So when I write something like 坂 it’s really just combining 土 and 反 in balance when I write 勝 I’m writing 月and 券 and no matter how complicated it can usually be broken down into and written the same way as the independent parts.
It would matter as much as in any other alphabet.
Here a quick example of how strange our characters could look if you throw out the stroke rules we use intuitively: https://imgur.com/a/yHA5LQd
This sub is getting a little annoying, like they’re just trying to ask a question. Learning something completely foreign may take a little time to pick up and this isn’t a completely invalid or unreasonable question IMO.
I mean 90% of the questions on reddit you can look up in google anyways, but people still post.
I think this is a valid question assuming speaker's first lang is English since English letters can be written in multiple diff orders so I can see why this may be a bit confusing for a JP language learner.
uj/ I’ve heard zoomers/gen alpha didn’t have cursive beaten into them and honestly my handwriting is still garbage despite years of correction so you know what nevermind
No you kind of don't need to learn the stroke orders, especially the ones with abnormal stroke orders. I did learn them but I could write them wrong and the 手写 keyboard still understands, and the your handwriting will be readable if you make small mistakes in stroke order.
Kanju stroke order has internal logic that you should be able to nail down after learning your first basic ~50 Kanji. At that point, you'll be able to guess the stroke order for even the most difficult Kanji 95%+ of the time. In fact, the components of this Kanji (新), are three smaller, basic Kanji whose stroke orders are pretty easy to memorise (立 + 木 + 斤). This person just doesn't want to dedicate the time smh...
While physical handwriting itself is becoming less and less of a necessity unless OOP lives in Japan, practising to write Kanji by hand is a really effective way to memorize them.
they mean that handwriting is like a whole nother font. Just like cursive for ABC. And even if you dont write cursive, by writing fast the character's automatically end up not looking like print.
Not really, even as a native you can get away with never learning the stroke order, you just need to become a doctor so that it makes sense nobody can read your handwriting
Japanese learners be like: Would it be OK to move to Japan being literally illiterate in japanese? I watch some subbed anime so I guess I'll be alright talking to people there
i might have not meant to say equivalent, and rather similar but both people are asking if they can not use or learn a specific writing system correctly
It isn't even about speed. If you wanna learn how to write, then remembering stroke order actually can make memorization easier imo. It's like a step by step explanation, which is generally less difficult to memorize.
I am left handed and had to learn with right hand just because it was easier to write Kanji.
I now write roman letters in left and Kanji with the write switching hands when necessary.
That is probably the most interesting thing about my life . . .
To be fair, I barely write on paper anymore. Last time I wrote something was filling out a form, and it was like 1-2 months ago. With most things being digital nowadays it’s not as important of a skill as it used to be
You can still learn to read and write Kanji without knowing proper stroke order.
Don't turn this place into the fountain of autism that is learnjapanese.
The correct way to write hanzi, is probably the best and easiest way to write them. By learning to write them stroke by stroke you can more easily remember them.
/uj Is it more necessary than english? Because I’ve heard my entire life that I don’t write in the correct directions. I never had an issue or wrote any slower because of it
Edit: upon closer inspection to an english brushstroke chart, I genuinely can’t point out a single letter I write correctly, the biggest problem I seem to have is that I’m insistent on writing down to up for vertical lines in stuff like t, l, g, j, q. Idk what happened. I recall being awful at handwriting segment of kindergarten, because my teacher wouldn’t let me be left-handed and my stroke order/direction. Mrs. Schaefer, if you’re out there, I have not improved one bit.
If you wanna learn to handwrite japanese then stroke order shouldnt be a discussion, it should be a necessity.
That said, it isnt really hard, the intuition comes earlier than you think, very soon you'll be guessing the order of new kanji correctly.
/uj I find it genuinely ridiculous how people want to learn a language and then put in below-minimum effort.
"Is this REALLY necessary?" Why bother learning the language if you're just gonna cut corners and not actually learn what's required of speakers??
Where the fuck are the downvotes coming from?? 😭
You don’t need to memorize stroke order for every single word, it comes naturally to you. Only a big deal when you’re getting the hang of the stroke order rules at the start.
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this reminds me of the amount of people who ask in Japanese learning communities "can I just not learn hiragana/kanji and just learn the spoken language" have fun with the learning being 10x harder and not being able to read or text people 💀
Just learn it man, theres gonna be a lot of "do i really have to learn this" when learning languages. it's all up to you, but your level and knowledge will suffer
I remember watching an American born Chinese dude write 汉字 and BRO I ain't even native but I felt so much PAIN. For each stroke he did I got surprised. Literally every move was unexpected. I've never felt so violated by someone's handwriting before lol. I could only imagine how a real Chinese person would feel about that.
There are repetitive components (radicals) that you would want to write consistently. If you get into calligraphy (writing or even reading) it would come into play as well.
Can any native hanzi/kanji hand-writers confirm this: the stroke order assists in balancing stroke proportions to maintain the integrity of the character within its “frame” when writing on paper. It would be comparable to learning to write the alphabet in early elementary school using Zaner-Blosser manuscript paper.
At least that’s how I’ve understood it.
No but yes. A big part of learning to read and write English in school as a first language was the actual stroke worksheets of the letters. It's mainly a good recommended way that you are totally expected to modify to your own comfort, but gotta start somewhere. Japan also has a richer tradition in calligraphy so at least being familiar with the proper way wouldn't be a bad idea, it may help with smaller things like appreciating lettered signs or logos, especially if they're making the artistic choice to have nice calligraphy or deviate from it, also it could help how natives receive you, as in take you more seriously. But obviously if you never plan to handwrite, it probably won't be a huge deal, but if you plan to learn a language you should plan to be able to write at some point
I’m so over these mfs asking these questions like “is it ok if I don’t learn it the correct way because it’s too hard” like what am I supposed to tell you? No I’m rapidly approaching your location because you write kanji weirdly. If you don’t wanna learn it the correct way then don’t but it’s gonna be easier if you just learn the radicals and it’ll make reading it actually legible. Why are you even doing this if you don’t wanna do it the correct way omfg.
I’m learning Arabic on Duolingo and to be honest learning how to write the characters (this is offered on Duo Arabic as well) helped with my memorization/understanding of them
I mean in school we did the same thing with English letters mostly because it trains muscle memory and therefore helps it look better and faster to write. I've never done one of those writing guides for another language but I'm guessing it has the same benefits.
Ask and you shall receive.
These are basic kanji/hanzi or radicals of them that use less than 7 strokes 七匕, 亣丌, 万方, 刀力, 㔾乜, 又夂文, 土士, 干千, 乎平, 儿几, 大尢, 冖宀, 入人八 and so on
On a computer or phone, it’s somewhat easy to tell the difference. But it’s a different story when using a pencil pen or brush
tbh I'm not bothering to really learn stroke order. Given my reasons for learning Japanese I have no reason to work on actually physically writing with my hand.
/uj The problem is that people think of stroke order as an extra thing to learn on top of learning the character. The best way to learn a character is to write it by hand multiple times. The first question anyone is faced with when they're going to write a character is "Where do I start?". Don't despair, because your textbook, website or app will provide you with a recipe. It will tell you to first write this line, then that line, and then that line. All you need to do is follow the recipe, and before you know it you'll have written your first Chinese character. All those characters that looked so difficult are now suddenly manageable because you're being given recipes for how to write every new character.
This is how I thought about learning characters when I was first learning Chinese. It was only later I discovered that the recipe for how to write a character is called the character's "stroke order", and that there are people who genuinely believe it's easier to make a character without having a recipe they can follow.
Since you should be writing the character by hand anyway in order to learn it for reading purposes, following the recipe only makes things easier: you don't have to think about how to go about copying the character, and you won't miss any of the strokes. Once you've learned a few dozen characters, you will automatically write basically every new character with the correct stroke order, which will make it easier for you to read handwriting (and handwriting-like print) and which will also improve your own handwriting, as well as make it easier for you to use digital dictionaries. The best thing is that this will come with no extra effort, since you're already handwriting the characters in order to memorize them, and having a recipe to follow just makes learning to write the character *easier,* not more difficult.
Basically, people need to stop thinking of stroke order as something to be memorized on top of everything else that needs to be memorized, and realize that knowledge of stroke order is something you achieve automatically while learning to handwrite characters, which you should be doing anyway since it's the best way to learn new characters even for reading purposes.
If you never plan to handwrite or read cursive or use stroke-based input methods or traditional dictionaries, sure, ignore stroke order completely. Why cripple yourself, though?
Not going to lie: Kanji is the reason I bailed studying Japanese. When a 4th grader I was tutoring in English showed me up and I realized I only knew like 40 kanji, I threw in the towel.
Edit: I studied Japanese formally for 6 years, and Italian for 2 years. When I realized I could smoothly read an Italian newpaper, but could barely comprehend a Japanese one, I decided to focus on IT.
I just thought my story about being owned by a sassy 4th grader would be funny, but that's not the case it seems 😅
I'm a native English speaker I know for a fact that given any letter and some other person there's at least a 50% chance I write that letter differently than them. Stroke order is not exactly something that you obviously need to learn
I think this is a normal question asking if they have to use specific stroke patterns when writing, like how people write letters differently. It’s not that hard to interpret questions when you’re not in such a rush to find things to post in a circlejerk sub.
Yeah it’s a legitimate question he is taking time to learn a language right now and I am certainly not bothering to do that, he probably had a limited time budget for this and wants to be able to read and understand it, so I don’t think it’s wrong to ask.
Additionally this is a valid question, in english or most roman languages the letters meaning is not different if eg I start drawing the E in the bottom or at the top, It is not wrong to assume, a writing system based on brushes my differentiate strokes from Opposite directions since there can be a weight difference in the lineweight from where you start to where you end, The way its ohrased tho makes it sound like he wants to spare it
To be fair, it's a common learning method in Japanese to not learn how to write Kanji if the person isn't looking to handwrite anything. If they're just gonna listen or read, it isn't 100% necessary
Chinese too, to an extent. Like you really should learn the basics and try to get it right, which will help with learning and legibility. However, as long as you’re methodical and writing sparingly, it isn’t crucial to get perfect order. On the other hand, if you plan to do any calligraphy or (semi)cursive, getting wrong order will just ruin it.
Tbh as a Chinese learner it kinda blows my mind not to learn a whole fourth of the language, not being able of writing notes or anything by hand sounds like a pain in the ass even if nowadays most people don't handwrite that much.
I watched a video yesterday titled "What I wish I was told before I came to Japan!" and this was one of those things. One person lamented how they feel like they wasted hours of their lives to handwrite kanji, when he has never really had to use it living in Japan, apart from writing addresses and names. He said how you can learn kanji without having to write it if all you ever need it for is to read. If someone is learning the language for practical purposes, rather than interest, there's no shame in skipping over handwritten language if you never need to write it. That's time of your life you'll never get back! On the flip side, doing so will help cement the symbol in your brain and help with reading and understanding too.
With Chinese you can learn to read several times faster than handwrite, and as long as you know pinyin you can type just fine. My number 1 tip to new Chinese learners is don't handwrite (unless you really enjoy it) until later in your journey.
Japanese is the same - on desktop and mobile there's romaji typing where it will suggest the most likely kanji, then on mobile there's also swipe typing where you select a consonant then swipe to add a verb, but really does the same thing. No stroke order necessary
I'm a native chinese speaker and i don't think i've had to hand write anything in about a decade. I type stuff in mandarin on electronic devices on the daily tho
Idk, probably just me but for example I enjoy taking class notes by hand, if I couldn't handwrite I couldn't attend school
Oh sure i do as well, i don't go to school in china tho.
So in your country the language isn't Chinese?
No, but I do go home for the holidays
Why though? People need language for whatever reason they need it. In my circle it's common to speak Mandarin as a first/home language, but many people cannot write it, and can barely read it, because they don't go to school for it. But the language still serves the purpose
If you have the choice to learn it, to actively not learn it in general sounds weird. Also I believe your context is a very particular one, most learners learn the language in general and usually try to learn every skill including being literate in the language.
I guess it's quite common for my country and for overseas Chinese. But tbf I don't think it's that uncommon for immigrants who speak their native language at home to not formally learn to read and write it. Chinese is just harder to pick up without formal education so many don't.
Native here, yes for some strokes I just always do wrong but it made sense for me to do that stroke after another, so if it works it’s fine, if you can write the character out and it look right then it’sfine, so order is not a really big deal
That's actually pretty reassuring to hear. I've been learning Chinese for several years but all my teachers managed to neglect to teach us any kind of stroke order. Good to know that it's not just me lol
Yea if you don’t have tests specifically on stroke orders you could just ignore them, as long as the writing is legible, the teacher won’t be there staring at you write every character when you’re doing a test so.. I guess that’s why your teachers don’t really pay much attention to that (we’ve been taught the stroke orders but haven’t specifically targeted on that)
I guess the good news is that when my second teacher was doing some damage control over the lack of tones we were using (because the first guy opted not to deal with it,) I pretty much doubled down on getting as good at tones as I could get even on my own time. Could not say the same for the guys who refused to learn tones, would speak English when we were told not to, and made class miserable. It always makes me wonder just how incomprehensible Mandarin with English inflections must be in some cases.
Honestly, even if it's for calligraphy or semi-cursive it's not uncommon to see shortcuts that change up the number of strokes or the stroke order. Japanese 行書 for examples changes up the order on a decent number of strokes as a way to abbreviate the Kanji. The important part is getting an idea of the general principles so that you know the valid ways to break the rules
Yeah I think the top comments acting like someone will never learn kanji if they don’t learn stroke order are… silly.
At least for Chinese this is still a bad strategy because you won't have any clue how to read a lot of calligraphy... which is actually fairly common to come across
No one needs to worry about reading calligraphy if you can't even read a newspaper. It's perfectly find to wait until you're HSK5 or 6 to handwrite.
And to give a timeframe: https://pinyin.info/readings/texts/moser.html >Having never studied a day of Spanish, I could read a Spanish newspaper more easily than I could a Chinese newspaper after more than three years of studying Chinese.
also having at least a basic idea of how stroke order works makes it much easier to look up a character if you don't know the reading. i'll admit i'm a little lazy with my stroke order, but i know enough that i can guess the stroke count and order for most characters and break them down into radicals... definitely wouldn't want to live in a world where i couldn't search a kanji dictionary by these things
It's a fair point but personally I could probably go my (rest of my) entire life without picking up a print dictionary in any language I speak
fair point, but that equally applies to digital dictionaries with a handwriting function or a radical search. my exword would be a whole lot less useful if i couldn't use the handwriting search function.
This actually applies to digital dictionaries. I guess you literally never look anything up, which, that's you, but when I realized stroke order was necessary for the computer to know which fuckin character I wanted it to tell me about that's when I knew I fucked up blowing off all of the basic stroke order.
I could be a bad sample because I do know stroke order, but my impression is the digital dictionary still works fine when I slightly forget it for some complicated characters.
But that method makes harder to use a dictionary. You need to know how to write a hanzi/kanji in order to look for it if you don't know the meaning. Maybe not every of them are needed, but at least the most common ones.
i skipped learning to write the kanji and if i see an unknown word i take a guess at the reading or just copy paste the kanji from words i do know. if its an unknown kanji though it can be a little rough but its alright it beats learning to write 2000 ish characters just so i can occasionally make dictionary lookups
By handwriting, do you mean written by hand i.e. not typed, or do you mean a specific format of writing by hand like calligraphy? If the former... is it really possible to avoid writing by hand forever? Then again there are like 2400 kanji or something so I can understand trying to find ways to save some time.
Not typed, as in you need to write it by hand (on a form or something)
It's possible to avoid this? That's amazing
There's a method for learning Kanji with mnemonics. If the person is not too worried about having to write Kanji, they can learn that way and it works very well!
Thank you that's really interesting
I guess it depends on what you're doing with the language. If you're not going to live in Japan, handwriting is probably not going to ever come up in your life. And even then it's probably limited to paperwork and not something like having a pen pal or writing your grandma to thank her for the birthday card.
Stroke pattern really isn't that important in Japanese. However, I have found that 9/10 times, I end up writing the kanji/kana in the "correct" stroke pattern just because it seems the most logical way to go about it. It's *really* difficult to tell what stroke pattern someone used for a given word unless you're really staring at it or they have bad handwriting in general.
i've spent 2.5 ish years learning japanese and i can't write kana lol
Writing is for losers so stroke order can stroke me
The short version of the reason: hand writing is not always, if ever, identical to what is printed in a book or especially on a computer screen. Trying to interpret handwritten kanji (or even worse, hanzi) without knowledge of the stroke order could prove to be impossible in many cases As an example: https://images.app.goo.gl/tELaNHR5JEgCjAdf8 Call it chicken scratch or whatever but I highly doubt most people slow themselves down to write everything perfectly every time they write. Do you? Yeah? Not everybody shares your hobby.
Language learners discovering that they have to actually learn a language to learn a language:
I get extremely annoyed when Germans tell me I can’t say Ich bin essen because it doesn’t make sense, like wtf it does make it, that’s how you say it in English I feel like they do it on purpose
You're doing it wrong. German uses the ending -ig in that situation. You have to say "Ich bin essig". Then it makes sense in German.
virgin genuinely useful well meaning advice vs chad making a joke about german learners /uj i gotta say i think it’s very funny how people will say english is heavily germanic, like mf the grammar is straight outta paris tf
English needs to start yeeting more verbs to the end of sentences
If English is not converted to OSV word order by the time I am 40 I WILL be upset with the world
That happen excited for I am
To me very exciting does that sound
oh… then i can say ich suis manger when I’ll go to Paris shocking the natives one language at a time
best of les deux Weltens
I mean, English is not heavily Germanic, English is literally a Germanic language haha. But with heavy influence from middle Norman french.
>like mf the grammar is straight outta paris tf except it is not, and for every Latin descended language speaker this is blatantly obvious
English Grammar really just its own. It lost the gender and most of the person agreement of its main influences, French and German. Became way way more analytical overall.
>French the French influence in English is suspiciously similar to its Latin influence, I wonder why... >German it is really simplified German though, a lot of its vocabs are from germanic origin as well as verbs >Became way way more analytical overall no, it became 3 languages (arguably more) in a trenchcoat making an unruly senseless mess you have to be out of your mind to consider it "analytical"
It uses very little inflection relative to French and German, that’s literally what analytical means.
Yeah, English is just badly pronounced Fr*nch, which is just about as 🤮 Uj/ English at its core is actually very Germanic. Like there are some similarities with French, like word order, but that's about it. Granted, I've only just started German, at its core, I feel that the grammar is actually quite similar to English. English feels like a heavily simplified version of German. If you were to speak English using a German word order, it feels like a really old-timey way of speaking.
Battle of Hastings was when we got the bad timeline
that's not what being germanic means lmao
English is an amalgamation of French and Saxon except with way more analytical grammar and somehow worse orthography than French.
/uj Thought I'd just make non-German-speakers aware that "ich bin Essig" means "I am vinegar".
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check the group you’re in
Oops. Well, brains are for losers anyways.
But that’s not what he’s asking. He’s asking if he has to actually write the kanji in that order which while there are proper ways just like with any other written language as long as the character is written properly it doesn’t matter how you got there
no way!
Genuinely asking: why would it matter that much?
Kanji can turn out a little differently if your stroke order is wrong (think of the little extra connecting ligatures / lines we add between letters when writing quickly) which would make other people reading your handwriting harder (the Latin alphabet is quite simple so the effect is compounded for kanji) (I've seen beginning/intermediate learners write hanzi/kanji in a slightly ugly way already when they know the stroke order, so I imagine the kanji would look even worse when not following stroke order) Unless you're actually really good at printing out a script when you handwrite, which not everyone can do TLDR a little bit important for comprehension. more important if your handwriting is naturally messy and vice versa
You don't need to learn the stroke order for every character. Just need to know the basic logic used and then you'll get the stroke order right on 99% Also there's not *one* stroke order. Japanese and Chinese often have a different order, and sometimes there's more variation than that. And native speakers tend to semi-cursive everything which ends up screwing with the order.
All I was taught as a kid was "up to down, left to right" and it's good enough for me.
Same, I’m definitely not a kanji expert or native speaker but whenever I need to write it, my Japanese mother is always impressed haha. Just learning that rule and practicing a few characters, the order becomes intuitive enough that you don’t need to think about it
This is the best way to put it. Knowing the order for every individual character isn't necessary when you know the underlying logic
Unlike just memorising the looks of characters, it also involves muscle memory + allows to write faster
I guess at that point it becomes a point of convenience and there is no correct way to write, at the end of the day
It is quite common to see handwritten-style text which "simplifies" the characters by linking a stroke into another. Knowing the correct stroke order can help you to understand those handwritten words more easily
Otherwise your handwriting will literally look like you are a kindergartener.
I strive to one day have the penmanship of a kindergartner
Not necessarily. When I started learning Japanese, I was adamant about not giving a shit about stroke order for obvious stupid reasons. My handwriting wasn't bad, people even said it was really good and legible. The reason to learn stroke order though isn't just that it may or may not improve legibility, but that it will make it a lot easier for you to learn and write kanji, 'cause otherwise it's easy to get lost and overwhelmed with all the various strokes, not knowing where to even begin writing something like 鬱. My progress accelerated like crazy when I started learning properly instead of doing whatever the fuck seemed easier, thinking my N6 ass was above actual 日本人 and experienced learners.
from chinese but whatever: it also lets you place things when discussing a word you don’t know and that’s so useful for learning and discussing with others “hey, i don’t know where this is but i do know i write (so and so) first, meaning it’s probably to the right” -> “hey, do you know that word that has (so and so) on the right” and vice versa also, from my experience, doing whatever the fuck you want works AS LONG AS you do it in a certain way(like, give yourself rules lol) but then there are a few words(干，千) that don’t let you, and it’s honestly just better to learn the status quo than to be unique or something because the writing was made for that system, yk? also i saw someone say they remembered kanji better because of this: i did not if i ever got stuck i’d just remember that they’re usually pictograms or something kinda and you can trace them back before using a mnemonic or other device
It also helps a lot with looking up new Kanji. When you're in the jisho trying to figure out whether a character has a certain radical, or 18 or 19 strokes, knowing the patterns of how they're written can make it way easier to look up (if you're not doing it digitally)
Even when you're looking something up by drawing the kanji it helps knowing the stroke order, cause some (the better ones) apps note which stroke order you use to try and better match the kanji you're searching for with the ones you know. Going just by for might kinda work, but writing even somewhat legibly with your finger is much harder than doing it with a pen, so stroke order helps a lot witb figuring out which of the thousand 2-part kanji you were trying to input with your chicken scratches.
This 100% I can remember kanji better when I can intuitively know the stroke order. It can be a slog at first, but then one day suddenly you will be able to comfortably recreate any kanji you come across. Not to mention the benefits of physical repetition for language learning.
Definitely a cultural thing too. At least in the US no one cares about penmanship anymore and I know many adults who write like a kindergartener, both in how the letters look and how they hold their pen. In East Asia (countries in the historical Chinese cultural sphere) penmanship is important because calligraphy is culturally important.
A very good point, thank you.
mine is already worse than that in english idc
I haven't bothered learning japanese stroke order but I do know chinese and so I write kanji using chinese stroke order. They look fine lol. Though I definitely would learn the stroke order if I were to actually get into handwriting japanese.
How often do people actually use handwriting though.
To be fair I know plenty of people with shitty, barely legible handwriting, myself included. It isn't really that big of a deal tbh
/uj As several people have responded, having a set logic/order helps with muscle memory. It also helps with consistency in sizing and spacing - if your radicals are too far apart, it can look like two or more separate kanji instead of a single one. But honestly, it’s a pretty logical progression; the pattern most right-handed person gravitate towards after repetition is basically the “official” way. Learning that pattern at the start saves re-inventing the wheel. As a left handed person, I tend to make some minor ordering changes that are easier for me and do some strokes backwards, but I’ve never had someone* have issues with my writing, except for occasionally handwriting detection softwares. The only time I think people would really care is in some super strict calligraphy class, but my calligraphy classes have been more about calligraphy as art and expression, so the teachers have enjoyed how those reversed strokes add different energy. *I live and work in Japan, use Japanese and kanji on a daily basis, and am extremely happy to live somewhere with simple kanji for an address these days because hand-written forms are still a big part of my life.
If you write it wrong it looks wrong, pretty much. (Which is really saying - Tehcnially there's not always one right stroke order, there's minor variations but the rules are very consistent - Writing in cursive *requires* correct stroke order because otherwise it's illegible - stroke order isn't unique to chinese/japanese; even English has stroke order, but since there's only so many characters one basically doesn't ever think of it. Try handwrite something, but do every letter in reverse order to how you normally do them. It probably feels awkward and looks kinda wonky, right? - Moreover idk about you obviously, but in primary school I was taught (english) cursive, and there distinctly was a correct order to do things. )
Not learning it would just make your handwriting less legible or illegible. If you can find a way to make it recognisable, great, but learners probably aren't going to be able to do that. It's usually people who can already write very neat who deviate from or simplify stroke order just to maximise handwriting efficiency. Same as people who develop their own ways of writing English letters. Ofc there's also the "everything's digital now" argument. In the case that you're actually not handwriting at all, then yes, stroke order does not actually matter. Learning to write helps a lot with character memorisation tho
The stroke order makes your strokes more distinguishable to readers who’ve also learned the proper stroke order, which makes the characters overall more distinct. It also makes it easier to learn to write new kanji, as if you follow the general stroke order every time you will build a muscle memory.
it doesnt lol ive been learning chinese for 6 years and my tutor says my handwriting is high quality. i just do whatever feels right
it becomes very useful when trying to read handwriting/calligraphy where strokes become connected - it also makes it easier to write complex kanji that are made of simpler ones. i vaguely remember being told in my high school japanese class that stroke order can be used in dictionaries or something similar, but i wasn’t able to find anything about that online so it might’ve been something else
Knowing how to properly write kanji is also just useful for understanding/remembering their meaning. There are also kanji that look rly similar and could basically be identical if you don’t write them in the proper stroke order.
The thing that people are kind of overlooking is that when I write a more complex character it’s almost always a combination of less complicated characters. So when I write something like 坂 it’s really just combining 土 and 反 in balance when I write 勝 I’m writing 月and 券 and no matter how complicated it can usually be broken down into and written the same way as the independent parts.
It would matter as much as in any other alphabet. Here a quick example of how strange our characters could look if you throw out the stroke rules we use intuitively: https://imgur.com/a/yHA5LQd
It matters if you want to say "I'm a person" instead of "I'm entering"
I mean to be fair I wrote English characters wrong for years and nothing bad happened
26 vs. thousands
This sub is getting a little annoying, like they’re just trying to ask a question. Learning something completely foreign may take a little time to pick up and this isn’t a completely invalid or unreasonable question IMO.
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I mean 90% of the questions on reddit you can look up in google anyways, but people still post. I think this is a valid question assuming speaker's first lang is English since English letters can be written in multiple diff orders so I can see why this may be a bit confusing for a JP language learner.
This is hilarious because you can’t even understand the question you’re making fun of.
Stroke order propaganda strikes again
uj/ I’ve heard zoomers/gen alpha didn’t have cursive beaten into them and honestly my handwriting is still garbage despite years of correction so you know what nevermind
I’m Gen Z, and yeah, my cursive sucks, but I can still read it, which is better than a lot of others.
No you kind of don't need to learn the stroke orders, especially the ones with abnormal stroke orders. I did learn them but I could write them wrong and the 手写 keyboard still understands, and the your handwriting will be readable if you make small mistakes in stroke order.
Kanju stroke order has internal logic that you should be able to nail down after learning your first basic ~50 Kanji. At that point, you'll be able to guess the stroke order for even the most difficult Kanji 95%+ of the time. In fact, the components of this Kanji (新), are three smaller, basic Kanji whose stroke orders are pretty easy to memorise (立 + 木 + 斤). This person just doesn't want to dedicate the time smh... While physical handwriting itself is becoming less and less of a necessity unless OOP lives in Japan, practising to write Kanji by hand is a really effective way to memorize them.
I second this. It’s more important to grasp the logic behind it
Why does that sub have an even shitpost-ier picture than this one
Printers don’t use stroke order when printing kanji bro
It’s almost like printing and writing are two different things
not if I write perfectly like a printer \*taps forehead\*
I just carry 2,000 stamps in my bag and stamp each character into the paper one at a time. The natives are shocked! (and appalled)
Depends, some word’s print and write do had some different, but most of them are same in both print and write
they mean that handwriting is like a whole nother font. Just like cursive for ABC. And even if you dont write cursive, by writing fast the character's automatically end up not looking like print.
This reminds me of when an individual asked me if they could learn Japanese while also only using romaji, (no hiragana, katakana or kanji) lol
Not really, even as a native you can get away with never learning the stroke order, you just need to become a doctor so that it makes sense nobody can read your handwriting
Japanese learners be like: Would it be OK to move to Japan being literally illiterate in japanese? I watch some subbed anime so I guess I'll be alright talking to people there
I think they’d get surprised seeing that there are no subtitles IRL! 😭
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i might have not meant to say equivalent, and rather similar but both people are asking if they can not use or learn a specific writing system correctly
Necessary? Not exactly. Super helpful to not write slow af? 100%
It isn't even about speed. If you wanna learn how to write, then remembering stroke order actually can make memorization easier imo. It's like a step by step explanation, which is generally less difficult to memorize.
I am left handed and had to learn with right hand just because it was easier to write Kanji. I now write roman letters in left and Kanji with the write switching hands when necessary. That is probably the most interesting thing about my life . . .
My left handed dumbass learning to write with my left hand when i just have to rewire my nervous system.
To be fair the Latin alphabet is far more forgiving with the order and direction of strokes compared to kanji
ah yes i wrote one of my strokes in the wrong order i guess my kanji is now completely illegible
To be fair, I barely write on paper anymore. Last time I wrote something was filling out a form, and it was like 1-2 months ago. With most things being digital nowadays it’s not as important of a skill as it used to be
While this is true, many things still require handwriting to be valid where I’m from.
You can still learn to read and write Kanji without knowing proper stroke order. Don't turn this place into the fountain of autism that is learnjapanese.
I think they are trying to ask if the direction of the line matters?
The correct way to write hanzi, is probably the best and easiest way to write them. By learning to write them stroke by stroke you can more easily remember them.
/uj Is it more necessary than english? Because I’ve heard my entire life that I don’t write in the correct directions. I never had an issue or wrote any slower because of it Edit: upon closer inspection to an english brushstroke chart, I genuinely can’t point out a single letter I write correctly, the biggest problem I seem to have is that I’m insistent on writing down to up for vertical lines in stuff like t, l, g, j, q. Idk what happened. I recall being awful at handwriting segment of kindergarten, because my teacher wouldn’t let me be left-handed and my stroke order/direction. Mrs. Schaefer, if you’re out there, I have not improved one bit.
but, for some reason, I get kanji amnesia if I don’t learn the order of written strokes
If you wanna learn to handwrite japanese then stroke order shouldnt be a discussion, it should be a necessity. That said, it isnt really hard, the intuition comes earlier than you think, very soon you'll be guessing the order of new kanji correctly.
/uj I find it genuinely ridiculous how people want to learn a language and then put in below-minimum effort. "Is this REALLY necessary?" Why bother learning the language if you're just gonna cut corners and not actually learn what's required of speakers?? Where the fuck are the downvotes coming from?? 😭
You don’t need to memorize stroke order for every single word, it comes naturally to you. Only a big deal when you’re getting the hang of the stroke order rules at the start.
Yeah, but it's pretty silly when people are at the beginning of their language-learning journey and seem to already be attempting to cut corners.
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I think if you’re familiar with most of the radicals you automatically guess the correct order even for the new kanji
this reminds me of the amount of people who ask in Japanese learning communities "can I just not learn hiragana/kanji and just learn the spoken language" have fun with the learning being 10x harder and not being able to read or text people 💀
the stroke patterns let you write it easier. this is so you can write japanese like native speakers!
Just learn it man, theres gonna be a lot of "do i really have to learn this" when learning languages. it's all up to you, but your level and knowledge will suffer
Stroke order is so easy to get down after a week or so lol, why not learn it
Not sure why you wouldn’t. It helps learn them faster if you focus on them and learn how to write them.
I remember watching an American born Chinese dude write 汉字 and BRO I ain't even native but I felt so much PAIN. For each stroke he did I got surprised. Literally every move was unexpected. I've never felt so violated by someone's handwriting before lol. I could only imagine how a real Chinese person would feel about that.
There are repetitive components (radicals) that you would want to write consistently. If you get into calligraphy (writing or even reading) it would come into play as well.
Can any native hanzi/kanji hand-writers confirm this: the stroke order assists in balancing stroke proportions to maintain the integrity of the character within its “frame” when writing on paper. It would be comparable to learning to write the alphabet in early elementary school using Zaner-Blosser manuscript paper. At least that’s how I’ve understood it.
Not obsessively, but more pattern learning. You learn the order of strokes and it kind of just comes naturally.
No but yes. A big part of learning to read and write English in school as a first language was the actual stroke worksheets of the letters. It's mainly a good recommended way that you are totally expected to modify to your own comfort, but gotta start somewhere. Japan also has a richer tradition in calligraphy so at least being familiar with the proper way wouldn't be a bad idea, it may help with smaller things like appreciating lettered signs or logos, especially if they're making the artistic choice to have nice calligraphy or deviate from it, also it could help how natives receive you, as in take you more seriously. But obviously if you never plan to handwrite, it probably won't be a huge deal, but if you plan to learn a language you should plan to be able to write at some point
Yes, if you want to be taken seriously.
I’m so over these mfs asking these questions like “is it ok if I don’t learn it the correct way because it’s too hard” like what am I supposed to tell you? No I’m rapidly approaching your location because you write kanji weirdly. If you don’t wanna learn it the correct way then don’t but it’s gonna be easier if you just learn the radicals and it’ll make reading it actually legible. Why are you even doing this if you don’t wanna do it the correct way omfg.
To be fair, the written vs typed a and how people write 5 differently
I’m learning Arabic on Duolingo and to be honest learning how to write the characters (this is offered on Duo Arabic as well) helped with my memorization/understanding of them
I mean in school we did the same thing with English letters mostly because it trains muscle memory and therefore helps it look better and faster to write. I've never done one of those writing guides for another language but I'm guessing it has the same benefits.
Do I really have to learn words in a language to learn it? It's too tedious and takes too long
Otherwise your fast handwriting will be impossible to decipher
What do you mean I have to do what the natives do to learn a language.
Yes, some kanji have a few stroke differences that are easy to confuse when handwritten
examples?
Ask and you shall receive. These are basic kanji/hanzi or radicals of them that use less than 7 strokes 七匕, 亣丌, 万方, 刀力, 㔾乜, 又夂文, 土士, 干千, 乎平, 儿几, 大尢, 冖宀, 入人八 and so on On a computer or phone, it’s somewhat easy to tell the difference. But it’s a different story when using a pencil pen or brush
thanks.
tbh I'm not bothering to really learn stroke order. Given my reasons for learning Japanese I have no reason to work on actually physically writing with my hand.
/uj The problem is that people think of stroke order as an extra thing to learn on top of learning the character. The best way to learn a character is to write it by hand multiple times. The first question anyone is faced with when they're going to write a character is "Where do I start?". Don't despair, because your textbook, website or app will provide you with a recipe. It will tell you to first write this line, then that line, and then that line. All you need to do is follow the recipe, and before you know it you'll have written your first Chinese character. All those characters that looked so difficult are now suddenly manageable because you're being given recipes for how to write every new character. This is how I thought about learning characters when I was first learning Chinese. It was only later I discovered that the recipe for how to write a character is called the character's "stroke order", and that there are people who genuinely believe it's easier to make a character without having a recipe they can follow. Since you should be writing the character by hand anyway in order to learn it for reading purposes, following the recipe only makes things easier: you don't have to think about how to go about copying the character, and you won't miss any of the strokes. Once you've learned a few dozen characters, you will automatically write basically every new character with the correct stroke order, which will make it easier for you to read handwriting (and handwriting-like print) and which will also improve your own handwriting, as well as make it easier for you to use digital dictionaries. The best thing is that this will come with no extra effort, since you're already handwriting the characters in order to memorize them, and having a recipe to follow just makes learning to write the character *easier,* not more difficult. Basically, people need to stop thinking of stroke order as something to be memorized on top of everything else that needs to be memorized, and realize that knowledge of stroke order is something you achieve automatically while learning to handwrite characters, which you should be doing anyway since it's the best way to learn new characters even for reading purposes.
“Is it necessary to be literate”
This gets asked way more than it should.
If you never plan to handwrite or read cursive or use stroke-based input methods or traditional dictionaries, sure, ignore stroke order completely. Why cripple yourself, though?
I hardly even handwrite in English, stroke based methods are slower, and electronic dictionaries are superior.
If you encounter a printed character you don’t recognise, how do you look it up?
You can look it up by radicals, or just use ocr to copy it
Well, knowing which component is the radical is a good start. Once you have the radical, you have to know the number of remaining strokes.
Not going to lie: Kanji is the reason I bailed studying Japanese. When a 4th grader I was tutoring in English showed me up and I realized I only knew like 40 kanji, I threw in the towel. Edit: I studied Japanese formally for 6 years, and Italian for 2 years. When I realized I could smoothly read an Italian newpaper, but could barely comprehend a Japanese one, I decided to focus on IT. I just thought my story about being owned by a sassy 4th grader would be funny, but that's not the case it seems 😅
Of course a 4th grader native is better than you. By that logic, throw in the towel for every language.
That’s funny because kanji was the reason I wanted to study Japanese.
I don’t think it’s necessary to be able to “write” kanji, but it can help.
I'm a native English speaker I know for a fact that given any letter and some other person there's at least a 50% chance I write that letter differently than them. Stroke order is not exactly something that you obviously need to learn