You’re learning hiragana? Yeah may as well learn to write them. Won’t take too long and you’ll get some mileage out of it someway or another, most likely.
Writing in the correct order makes your characters look more natural. It used to make more difference when people wrote with a brush and cared about calligraphy. The mean elementary teacher would rap your knuckles for screwing up. Now with a ballpoint pen, it makes less difference. There are alternative writing orders which are just fine, and writing fast will make everything flow together.
So it’s worth paying attention to, but not obsessing over. It is, however, generally useful to write characters rather than just looking at them on a computer screen. What you write, you remember. So writing a character ten times while repeating the sound out loud will help you remember, even if you don’t really need to write them in practice.
Get a paper practice book with squares, and you will learn to write a balanced character which fills out the square. And you will get the stroke order right.
For the computer it help it judge whether its the right character. Practically wise its helpful for getting the right shape but not necessarily mandatory. I would absolutely learn it for the kana. Have you ever scene when someone writes an “a” but they learned it from print only so it looks like a floppy d. That’s what its like when you get the stroke order wrong. People can puzzle it out but once you get to a high enough level you look like a dofus.
When it comes to more complicated kanji (25+ ~ strokes) though everybody has there own special way they figured it out and as long as its neat nobody cares.
Yes. Definitely 💯
hiragana and katakana were originally shortcuts for larger kanji, and many of the kana are themselves small chunks that get reused in kanji anyways and should retain their relative stroke order
Hiragana and kanji has a correct stroke order. If you use these character recognition software, the stroke order is important, because that’s part of the test.
When it comes to more complex characters, the software would have to struggle a lot to find the correct character if it was to allow all stroke order combinations. For 5 strokes you have 5!=120 combinations, with 10 strokes it gives you 10!=3.6 million different combinations.
The order is also there to make it easier to make the character look correct in the end. It also helps with looking up in dictionaries, and knowing the order and being consistent in the order will help with remembering the kanji. You can pussle the parts together easier.
But if you write it in a different order and it looks correct and that order makes more sense to you, then that’s fine. It won’t change the meaning.
The stroke order is a tool you can use, but only you choose if you want to utilize it. The alphabet doesn’t have a correct stroke order, but there are common stroke orders, not everyone does the same. However just as with the alphabet, we can take shortcuts in writing Japanese characters. We can write A as 2 or 3 strokes. Similarly そ can be written with a single stroke or with 2 strokes.
Yes. Kana in hiragana and katakana can sometimes make up kanji, and it can help a lot with remembering how kanji should be written. Stroke order also helps distinguish kanji written in cursive fonts or handwriting that often look very different from standard font on a computer. It comes pretty naturally after a while so it doesn’t require too much extra effort to learn the stroke order after an initial introduction to kana & kanji.
8 comments
Yes
for kanji it’s handy for dictionary lookups
You’re learning hiragana? Yeah may as well learn to write them. Won’t take too long and you’ll get some mileage out of it someway or another, most likely.
Writing in the correct order makes your characters look more natural. It used to make more difference when people wrote with a brush and cared about calligraphy.
The mean elementary teacher would rap your knuckles for screwing up. Now with a ballpoint pen, it makes less difference. There are alternative writing orders which are just fine, and writing fast will make everything flow together.
So it’s worth paying attention to, but not obsessing over. It is, however, generally useful to write characters rather than just looking at them on a computer screen. What you write, you remember. So writing a character ten times while repeating the sound out loud will help you remember, even if you don’t really need to write them in practice.
Get a paper practice book with squares, and you will learn to write a balanced character which fills out the square. And you will get the stroke order right.
For the computer it help it judge whether its the right character. Practically wise its helpful for getting the right shape but not necessarily mandatory. I would absolutely learn it for the kana. Have you ever scene when someone writes an “a” but they learned it from print only so it looks like a floppy d. That’s what its like when you get the stroke order wrong. People can puzzle it out but once you get to a high enough level you look like a dofus.
When it comes to more complicated kanji (25+ ~ strokes) though everybody has there own special way they figured it out and as long as its neat nobody cares.
Yes. Definitely 💯
hiragana and katakana were originally shortcuts for larger kanji, and many of the kana are themselves small chunks that get reused in kanji anyways and should retain their relative stroke order
if you like, you can look up which kanji became which kana, and you can see where the shapes came from: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kana#/media/File:FlowRoot3824.svg](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kana#/media/File:FlowRoot3824.svg)
Yea, but not really.
Hiragana and kanji has a correct stroke order. If you use these character recognition software, the stroke order is important, because that’s part of the test.
When it comes to more complex characters, the software would have to struggle a lot to find the correct character if it was to allow all stroke order combinations. For 5 strokes you have 5!=120 combinations, with 10 strokes it gives you 10!=3.6 million different combinations.
The order is also there to make it easier to make the character look correct in the end. It also helps with looking up in dictionaries, and knowing the order and being consistent in the order will help with remembering the kanji. You can pussle the parts together easier.
But if you write it in a different order and it looks correct and that order makes more sense to you, then that’s fine. It won’t change the meaning.
The stroke order is a tool you can use, but only you choose if you want to utilize it. The alphabet doesn’t have a correct stroke order, but there are common stroke orders, not everyone does the same. However just as with the alphabet, we can take shortcuts in writing Japanese characters. We can write A as 2 or 3 strokes. Similarly そ can be written with a single stroke or with 2 strokes.
Yes. Kana in hiragana and katakana can sometimes make up kanji, and it can help a lot with remembering how kanji should be written. Stroke order also helps distinguish kanji written in cursive fonts or handwriting that often look very different from standard font on a computer. It comes pretty naturally after a while so it doesn’t require too much extra effort to learn the stroke order after an initial introduction to kana & kanji.