I started learning Japanese about two weeks ago (starting with Duolingo and now adding in more resources.) I bought some hiragana and katakana workbooks to help solidify what I was learning. English is my first language and I am left handed, many people have commented that I write many letters and numbers “backwards,” which was initially a surprise to me, because that’s just what my brain had always told my hand to do.
How important is the direction of each stroke (culturally and for best practice) when writing in Japanese? I have resources showing how to write many stokes, but often for me going from left to right is far less comfortable than right to left. Does it matter if the characters end up looking “right?”
I figured I’d ask for some advice before I forced myself to work against 30 years of fine motor practice.
9 comments
As a fellow lefty, you just have to deal with it. My Japanese teachers could **always** tell if I’d done the strokes in the wrong order or direction no matter how good I thought it looked.
I’m a lefty and follow the standard stroke order.
People will be able to tell whether you’re writing them properly judging from intricate details such as the starting point and initial direction, stroke slant, ending bits (lift, flicks, tapering to a point), varying levels of pressure and stroke thickness and width, separation, etc.
>How important is the direction of each stroke (culturally and for best practice) when writing in Japanese?
Characters have determined stroke orders. There are a bunch of rules of thumb they usually follow, but not always (in those cases, you’ll notice patterns, e.g. 王/全/主/etc. vs 金/鉛/銀/etc., 土/地/etc. vs 座/挫/etc.).
Do note, if you’re taking classes at uni or a language school, it’s almost a given that you’ll have to follow the stroke orders and write the right amount of strokes. In the real world, however, people won’t yell at you or anything for getting the orders wrong (getting the amount of strokes right is strongly recommended though).
>Does it matter if the characters end up looking “right?”
If you ask me, writing properly gives off a better impression. Also it helps build muscle memory, which helps a ton with recall. It’s up to you in the end; it’s not like they’ll put you in jail for getting a stroke wrong.
fellow lefty here. using correct stroke order is much more important in japanese than in english because many characters have a lot of strokes and look kind of similar. if you want to learn to write by hand (which absolutely isn’t necessary, depending on what your goals are) i would strongly suggest to stick with the correct stroke orders.
>I started learning Japanese about two weeks ago
Honestly, if you’ve just started learning Japanese then there are far more productive things to concentrate on than achieving good penmanship.
* For hiragana & katakana, try to write them reasonably well while you are learning. Following stroke order will help you later when you just scribble them down. For the most part, as long as they are recognizable, then you are good (like in any other language really). Have a look at [https://youtu.be/RZiKQh8oio4](https://youtu.be/RZiKQh8oio4) – this shows ‘good’ and ‘bad’ versions of handwritten kana. Most people will write somewhere in a spectrum between these examples. Notice though how the writer always follows the stroke order, making even the bad examples recognizable.
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* For kanji – I’d avoid learning to write them at all for now. Most people write using keyboard input these days and you only need to know kana (or even just romaji) to access the kanji. For now just focus on recognizing them (preferably as parts of words).
Honestly, stroke order doesn’t matter because being able to physically write in Japanese is one of the least important aspects of learning the language. Being able to type it on a keyboard or phone is far more useful. In the rare case you need to use it on a form or something, as long as its legible who cares?
Stroke order is definitely important for your characters to look correct. Rather than making up your own idiosyncratic lefty order, you might as well just learn the standard order.
I recommend practicing writing using standard practice paper, the way the Japanese do when learning: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genk%C5%8D_y%C5%8Dshi
You can buy books on Amazon or print pages yourself from a PDF: https://www.reddit.com/r/LearnJapanese/comments/ui6jb5/any_genkoyoushi_pdfs_for_kanji_writing_which_has/
The traditional Japanese writing direction is top-to-bottom, then columns go right-to-left, so it’s actually pretty friendly to lefties.
Unlike some of the advice that you may hear, I am definitely a fan of writing characters as part of the learning process. It’s the way natives have done it for hundreds of years. I learned Chinese and Japanese this way, writing each character 10 times while repeating the sound.
I have 2 Japanese colleagues that’re left handed. They both follow the correct stroke order when writing.
From what I’ve learned, your calligraphy will suck as a lefty, regardless of how you do it. Your characters will look always botched since, not only stroke order, but also flow and pressure are relevant for proper calligraphy, more so than in western alphabets.
Sounds silly, but Chinese, and by extension Japanese characters are, well, discriminatory. They are meant to be written by right-handed people only.
I think you just need to consider that strokes must be drawn from left to right, top to bottom, and watch out for square characters, and nicked strokes. This in case you need to write in the correct form, for academic purposes.
For day-to-day writing, you could do it however you want, but your writing speed will always be handicapped because, if you try to write hastily, your kanji will flow in wrong ways, thus making them harder to understand.