掲示板 Forums - Stroke order for kanji

Personally, Its a whatever. I mean not every person writes the English letters the same even though there is an official way to write them so I don't think it should matter they much in Japanese kanji.

Although your efficiency might decrease of your preferred stroke order isn't optimal

It may affect the ability of writing input tools to be able to figure out what you are writing. Some are expecting a specific stroke order, and mixing that up may make it harder for it to tell what you are doing.

For handwriting (not on a computer), if you write slowly and legibly you should be okay, but as you start to write kanji more quickly, they start to look more like scribbles, and then readers will tend to rely on the stroke order to interpret what those scribbles mean. But if you don't stick to the standard stroke order, that makes their job harder.

So, using the standard stroke order has some advantages, but you can probably get away without strictly sticking to it.

Can't speak for everyone, but getting the stroke order (and direction) right helped me correct some kanji that came out badly proportioned in my handwriting. And, as Anonymous123 said, it may not look like much while you still draw the kanji tidily, stroke by stroke, but once you get into a more "flowing" handwriting, it can really make them hard to recognise. (Kind of the way, in European countries that use cursive, some people's writing is a nightmare to decipher because they've never bothered to learn to cross their Ts and dot their Is.)

Stroke order and direction also helps me mentally separate their components and categorise them with "fellows" of similar radicals. That said, this is important to me because handwriting helps me immensely with remembering kanji. If you intend to hardly ever write kanji by hand, I don't know if it's that relevant. But otherwise, I figure there's a good reason why they've been doing it like that and not differently for a few centuries.

I'm going to go against the grain here, and say that it is extremely important. The reason is not your handwriting (well, not just that), but OTHER people's writing.

Japanese people, just like everyone else in the world，tend to be "lazy" (and I mean that in the best way) when writing. They write quickly (efficiently), don't lift up their pen nearly as much as they "should", and this results in (just like with some English characters) a lot of strokes getting blended together.

When reading Japanese out in the wild (handwritten, calligraphy, etc.) you are going to run into these.

Check out this kanji as an example:

The third is probably closest to what you'd be taught as the right way to draw it.

However, the bottom of the 5th example is extremely common - you see that the 4 strokes are written in one go.

This may seem like an "obvious" example, especially with all of my writing, but when you are deciphering written characters, knowing the correct order of the stroke will make it much easier to take that squiggle and break it apart in your head and figure out what character it is. The more complex the character, the more likely that you'll be able to use the stroke order to help in reading.

One might think that characters like this will only appear in person-to-person writings, and you'll think "who writes letters anymore?", but you'll see this in handwritten menus, posters in front of stores, and more.

I think it's important to internalize the general rules behind stroke order. They are mostly the same in different countries and only differ by minor details of how they handle edge cases. But it doesn't really matter if you use a slightly different one in these edge cases, especially since Japanese order isn't formally standardized. For example the way how 書 should be supposedly written in Japanese doesn't make sense to me (the last two strokes of the top component), and a lot of Japanese people also write it “wrong.” But, on the other hand, stroke order is the only visible difference between 右 and 左 in some Japanese writing. It's not always the prescribed order, but it's extremely important to use one of the sensible orders to write legibly, and to be on the same page to be able to read other's handwriting.

Mmmyes and no. In the beginning, we may all feel like it doesn't matter much, as long as we manage to remember it and draw it convincingly enough. We may even think we'll never write things in Japanese by hand, so it doesn't matter if it starts coming out wonky later on, as our handwriting naturally changes. BUT.

1) As マイコーさん said, not being familiar with stroke order and direction will make it very hard to understand not just other people's handwriting, but even less standard fonts. I'm not even talking about the really artsy ones, just try looking at fonts that are less textbook-precise.

2) We risk building the wrong associations and missing out on a lot of mnemonics value. To take the example given by the OP:

必 may look very similar to 心, but it has nothing to do with it. The second one evolved from a fairly anatomic representation of an actual heart, while the first is based on 戈 — spear, halberd, dagger — with an extra part to suggest bamboo reinforcement to the handle, which leads to the core of its meaning: something necessary, reliable, definite.

Do we normally care about that bla-bla? Probably not. We don't really need to know it. But thinking "it's like 'heart' only with that extra squiggle" risks getting in the way of really assimilating meanings and associations later on. It's something that's happened to me, at least. Not saying it's the same for everyone.

Drawing a kanji one way or another is a learning process anyway. We may feel "but this way just comes naturally", but very little short of basic instincts really does. Rather, if it feels "natural" the wrong way, it's because of some mistaken associations we've already formed. So, since we're learning them anyway, might as well learn them right — if the goal is to master Japanese as a lifelong skill, that is. If it's just to have fun playing with song lyrics (which is equally legit as a goal), then it really doesn't matter.