Some say not learning stroke order is the same as not learning to spell in English, but that’s not exactly analogous and honestly I feel like it’s a pretty dogmatic attitude to study something just because it’s traditionally been done so. I would say stroke order is more akin to people learning to handwrite beautifully and legibly which not everyone does really in English. I’m studying Japanese mainly to speak, listen, and read and to text in limited extent (where the Kanji are written automatically). If you had the same goals as me, would you study stroke order? Why or why not? I feel like discrediting someone’s Japanese skills just because they don’t know stroke order is akin to saying a doctor doesn’t truly know English because their handwriting sucks.
Edit: Appreciate everyone providing actual reasons instead of just using the dogmatic “you’re supposed to” argument. There seems to be not much effort required to learn stroke order and a lot of benefits, so I’ll learn it. Thanks guys!
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The only convenient way I have found to learn writing kanji is by an app that enforces stroke order. There might be some benefit to recognising the patterns in stroke order of similar radicals and kanji in aiding memory recall. Also learning the stroke order isn’t much more effort than learning the kanji without stroke order (depending on how you are learning them).
Stroke order can be useful for looking up kanjis on your phone (per handwriting input).
Stroke order isn’t something you have to learn extensivly for every individual kanji. Once you have learned like 50 you will be able to get the stroke order for 99% of all kaki right.
I’m by no means an expert on stroke order and I rarely ever write any kanji by hand. That said, I do have a rudimentary understanding of how stroke order works. And I like to tell myself it gives me a bit of help when I have to handwrite/copy a kanji in order to look up words in an online dictionary.
Knowing stroke order can help when you have to read other people’s handwriting because you understand how they are abbreviating the characters. If you know what I mean.
Most Japanese learn stroke order. It’s not akin to people learning ‘beautiful’ handwriting; only handwriting. Getting it wrong is like starting a ‘g’ by going from the bottom up, the end result can sometimes be a bit jarring.
Luckily, stroke order is, much like the basic direction of the alphabet, *incredibly* intuitive.
The whole thing with doctor’s handwriting is a false equivalency. Put just a little bit of effort in and you will realise; it’s absolutely not the same thing as learning calligraphy. It is much more fundamental.
This is pretty easy.
If you have trouble remembering Kanji, then learning stroke order can help you.
If this is not the case then it will be a waste of time
as someone who is native chinese (by descent), learning stroke order to write kanji is not that hard as people would think.
not sure how to type the strokes out but the order is top to bottom, left to right
with the strokes going from the easiest, heng, shu, pie, na, ti
but of course there are some exceptions and additional some strokes.
once you get the basic right, everything just come naturally. pick up nursery level chinese characters writing books and once you clear even level 1, everything should fall in place in writing any kanji.
sounds stupid but the way we learn chinese/japanese is writing a kanji over 50 times in one sitting even though by the 10th time, you may remember it. but it itches into your brain and other kanjis will just seem simple.
don’t bother to rush into writing 曜 kind of kanji but start off with relatively simple like 月火水木金土日
get the foundations right and others will come naturally.
I would say that it can help to know at least the basic rules. Counting strokes is one way to search for kanji in dictionaries, but if you do not have a clue on hot many strokes are required to write 口, then you won’t be able to use any method that require counting stokes.
It helps understanding the structure of kanji and at some point you start to see how characters become puzzles of each other. That’s what I found at least
it helps with dictionary lookups