I see a lot of people trying to avoid learning stroke order because they think it is unnecessary, and maybe it is. You don’t have to learn a stroke order to learn kanji… but is it helpful? I would say yes.
Stroke order takes maybe a few days to get down (it really isn’t complicated), and in my experience, —I can only really speak from experience here, will help you learn kanji more easily as you will be better able to comprehend the components of a kanji and in turn, more easily ‘recall’ that kanji which will, in turn… help you to memorize it.
From what I can observe with my own studies knowing stroke order will help to speed up the process of learning kanji and in the long run will outweigh whatever time you spend on learning it in the first place.
(Also, It really helps when looking up kanji you see somewhere but don’t know)
Anyway, that’s just my 2 cents on kanji and stroke order, nothing scientific or anything just what I’ve learned in my 3ish years experience with this language. And keep with it too this gets more fun as you grow. 頑張って
3 comments
busted too fast, now what
Yeah, I am thinking about learning to handwrite at least difficult kanji, to understand them better
Stroke orders can be guessed like 98% of the time from the basic rules + following the stroke orders of a kanji’s parts (e.g. any kanji that includes 兆, like 逃, 挑, etc. will use its stroke order).
The remaining 2% are the outlier patterns, like 座/挫/etc. vs 土, 藪, 飛, 升/昇/etc., 卑 (new form) vs 牌 (uses old form), 兆, 叫 vs 収, 虚 vs 噓 (uses old form), characters that include 臼 like 興/歃/鑿/與/etc., 偏 vs 冊, etc.