Japanese rules for writing your ABCs are surprisingly strict | Hacker News Reader

Japanese rules for writing your ABCs are surprisingly strict

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90 pointsbemmu165 comments

I took Japanese in college, and we were taught that this is because dictionaries are arranged by stroke. For Kanji characters there are tens of thousands of them, so "alphabetical" order is a meaningless concept, making stroke count and order the most meaningful ordering concept. But that then requires stroke order (and direction) something you have to be completely consistent about.

This is a memory from a couple of decades ago, so I could be wrong.

> so "alphabetical" order is a meaningless concept

Japanese does have its alphabetical order. It's called gojyuon-jyun (or aiueo-jyun) [1], and most commonly used dictionaries use this order [2].

[1] https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E4%BA%94%E5%8D%81%E9%9F%B3%E9...

[2] http://octoba.jp/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/jp.ne_.biglobe.s...

Only for hiragana/katakana though

? It's for all words, including words written in kanji.

Parent comment is about kanji and you’re talking hiragana pronunciation.

Words that may contain kanji that naturally has pronunciations are sorted by pronunciation, yes, but individual kanji never even had an inclusive list and thus no logically defined linear order existed/exist.

All Japanese words (not characters) have kana pronunciations, but yes, for individual kanji characters, people use a specific type of dictionary called kanji dictionary (漢字辞典) and the order of this dictionary is indeed not (always) based on the pronunciation (stroke count of radicals is often used for the paper version).

Here's an (online) example:

https://kanji.jitenon.jp/

On the right hand side of the above site, it shows the pronunciation (both on-yomi & kun-yomi) and the stroke count.

Actually, Chinese characters did originally have a defined linear order (or, rather several schools existed IIRC). It's been a while since I looked at this, but essentially they were ordered by radical and then pronunciation, with some other tie breaker rules. Japanese word dictionaries, though, are indeed usually ordered by pronunciation. Kanji dictionaries have a variety of different orders, but most of them are ordered by radical and stroke count.

I believe you are referring to the SKIP method, which near as I remember is really only used by one Dictionary publisher (at least 10 years ago, although a lot of dictionary apps I've seen include it now) and is a very modern invention.

The real reason comes down to legibility. Kanji written badly can be hard to read, and Katakana or Hiragana written improperly can throw you off as well (め、ぬ、ね、れ、わ、ろ、る、シ、ツ、ソ、ン、ク、タ、ヌ). Japanese teachers, just like teachers anywhere, try to teach good penmanship not just as a virtue, but because it makes their own lives easier to stick to the rules and to have their students stick to the rules. The language itself has also undergone some reforms since the Meiji era to standardize and regulate it, including the stroke order.

Hiragana letters are actually sorted from あ to ん like A to Z, but Kanji such as 阿 and 吽 or 本, 間, 新, 一 has no linear sort orders, is probably what GP was explained.

Hmm, could be, but if you're relying on stroke order for lookup, that sounds like the SKIP method to me. You have to have knowledge of the stroke order, and be able to figure out the exact stroke count by looking at a Kanji in order to use SKIP effectively. I'm not overly familiar with other lookup methods, possibly because I shaped my biases around using SKIP for lookups back when I studied Japanese.

This is a little off topic, but since I don't often get occasion to bring this up, let me drop it off here that there's also an alternative sort order which is an archaic (mostly, there are places that still use it), but cool sorting order called いろは ("iroha")[1] which is a poem which uses each character of the syllabary, each kana in other words, exactly once.

Also, if you open TextEdit on a Mac in Rich Text mode and create a list from the toolbar, there's an option to "Show More" which allows you to use いろは and other Japanese sort orders as bullet points.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iroha

The SKIP method is indeed a modern invention. It was invented by Jack Halpern and used in his Kanji dictionaries which were published by Kodansha and Kenkyusha - I guess this is where the 'single publisher' idea is coming from.

These dictionaries are all 'Learner's dictionaries', and I'm not sure if SKIP was ever used in a dictionary aimed at native speaker - although it is probably the best method for paper-based Kanji lookup.

The more traditional stroke-count based lookup, OP was referring to is probably the radical+stroke count lookup, which is of Chinese origin and considerably older[1]. Using that system, you would first find out the kanji's radical (部, basically just a "part" in Japanese), find the radical in the index, count the remaining number of strokes in the kanji and then find the kanji.

Both the radicals themselves and the kanji listed below each radical heading in the index are ordered by stroke count, which qualifies this system as stroke count ordering.

This system is unfortunately much more confusing than SKIP (especially for learners), since there is a good chunk of kanji where the radical is not apparent, some radicals have multiple variants - and of course you'd have to first learn all the 214 standard radicals in the first place.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kangxi_radical

Kanji dictionaries are usually not sorted by reading. These are the dictionaries you will be using for looking up unknown or obscure kanji, not for looking up words (which may be composed of multiple kanji - or no kanji at all!). Since it is assumed that if you don't know the kanji, you also don't its reading, sorting this kind of dictionary by reading doesn't make sense. Besides, unlike in Chinese, most Japanese kanji have multiple (often many) different readings, sorting by reading just doesn't make sense.

But besides Kanji dictionaries, most Japanese dictionaries (and other lists of words or name) are started by Gojūon (五十音), the standard sound order. If it is a specific word or name you're after, it generally has a distinct reading and it can by sorted by that reading.

> I took Japanese in college, and we were taught that this is because dictionaries are arranged by stroke.

There's multiple methods of searching a modern Kanji dictionary, but, yes, this is a useful property of stroke order. The bigger issue is when you have characters with 8+ strokes you quickly become reliant on specific shapes that come as artifacts to the stroke direction and order for proper identification, messing this up makes things a pain to read.

You also cannot purely rely on an "alphabetical" sorting in a Kanji dictionary anyway, as every character may have two pronunciations and you need to be able to look it up without knowing either. Some do have indexes letting you look a character up if you already know the on-yomi or kun-yomi reading but not the other, though.

Not much here about how clear or appealing the results are, aesthetically. In that respect, I think the rules are quite successful.

Many years ago, I made friends with a Japanese person while we were both rambling in New Zealand, and we wrote to each other on paper for a while afterward before switching to email. I liked her handwriting, and I imagined it had something to do with her personality - clear, perky, rounded, friendly.

I still had this image in mind until, much more recently, I visited the Death Railway museum at Kanchanaburi in Thailand, and I looked at the exhibits of records written by the Japanese jailers in the death camps during the second world war - and they had the same handwriting! The friendly handwriting of my correspondent was also the friendly handwriting of the commanders sending prisoners to their deaths.

It's a good script, and I learned something about not judging people by their handwriting. The goodness of my correspondent was real, but it wasn't manifest in her writing.

A nice example of Japanese stroke order mattering are two of the katakana, ツ and シ. The difference is that the former starts at the top left and the strokes move right, then down and across to the left. The latter starts at the top left and moves down, then up and across to the right. It can be hard to tell what one you are looking at in practice if you don't know this.

I think cursive used to serve the same function, which I basically conjecture from the fact that older people tend to be significantly better at reading cursive than me.

Your oldies are better at reading cursive because cursive used to be read and written much more than it is today. It was the fastest way to write, and people had to use it a lot.

Typewriters first and computers later removed a massive amount of handwriting. Schools in some countries reacted by dropping cursive altogether, probably because they thought the effort to learn it was not worth it anymore.

I've taken a dive into the world of shorthand. Another thing near killed by computers. Surprisingly fun to get into, though. (The ridiculous sexism in many of the books is cringe inducing...)

I learned just the letter-forms (no shortcut / brief forms) from Teeline Fast, really helped me when taking sermon notes or wanting to write in my journals with a bit of obfuscation.

I had heard it was mostly to reduce ink blotting?

It helps with that if done right, but you can also reduce ink blotting in block if you learn the right strokes. I've seen a lot of people write block with a cursive a for example, and I think that reduces blot.

Also, thick-inked ballpoint pens greatly increase the amount of pressure required to write. Cursive is faster if you use a fountain pen or a quill, but disjointed writing is faster with a regular Bic. If you've never tried one, a rollerball pen like the Pilot Precise V5 (regular or retractable) is much easier to write with because it uses fountain-pen-like ink.

And yet on a screen like this there are no strokes, and thus no order. They're shaped differently, but there's no way to tell what order the lines were originally drawn in.

The problem is, if you write by hand and you start writing really fast, you will distort the image. As long as you use the common stroke order, that distorsion will stay readable as it is a distorsion that people are familiar with. Use the wrong stroke order, and your letters will become undreadable at high writing speed.

I'd assume this is the reason why japanese calligraphy [1] is still readible to the skilled reader albeit the images having no obvious resemblance to the original characters

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_calligraphy

Sort of funny that I read this and knew it was intentional, yet couldn't resist the urge to reach out and try to rub the 'smudges' off my screen.

This is not strictly a Japanese thing. I've had similarly tough requirements on my handwriting in a french primary school, for instance. To the point where my work would be thrown out if I dared to write letters differently than what was ordered. I have heard similar stores from multiple other European countries.

I had the same experience in the U.S.

I had similar requirements for writing in school in Texas. I went into a special class to help kids falling behind in reading skills and they focused a huge amount of time on the way I wrote my characters. Probably not that important in helping me read as well as other kids at the time but who knows. They also said I would never be able to attend college and I now have a BS and MS so ...

My daughter went to a French school when she was six, and the teaching seemed to be rigorous about stroke order and direction in cursive handwriting.

(Now she’s seven and in an American school where they don’t seem to care about practicing handwriting at all, or indeed any kind of repetition. Instead the focus seems to be on parsing complex and ambiguous written instructions.)

> Instead the focus seems to be on parsing complex and ambiguous written instructions.

I love how this almost sounds like a compliment, almost.

There used to be rules for the hand you write with, too. Left-handed writing was forbidden, and didn’t work well, anyways when using a dip pen that wasn’t specially designed for left-handed use.

I think the Japanese obsession with stroke order has its roots in writing with brushes and slower-drying ink. If you use them, stroke order will affect what letters look like more than when using ballpoint pens.

Not really. Even with ball point, while for neat letter stroke order doesn't matter, for a messier (normal day-to-day) writing, stroke order absolutely matter. It can become illegible fast if you use wrong stroke order, because correct stroke order tend to create similar overall shape while the wrong order don't. Granted, you don't have to be exact with the stroke order, but general rule still need to be followed -- you can't just write it in reverse order and expect it to be easily readable.

I know when my dad grew up, in Scotland, he'd get hit with a ruler if he was seen writing with his left-hand..

Happily the rules had relaxed by the time I had to write left-handed, and very messily with a fountain-pen!

Quite a lot of Japanese people seem to recognise characters less by their shape and more by the stroke connections, in my experience. No matter what the tool used to write it, legibility really requires writing the characters in the correct order for the most part.

Am Romanian, a similar thing happened to me ~30 years ago, when I was in my 2nd or 3rd grade, i.e. I was drawing the letter capital S and the number 3 in a non-standard way (“backwards”, to quote my then elementary teacher) and that was not ok.

Had similar experience in Slovenia in elementary/middle school. We learned upper case and lower case typing, then cursive. All with strict rules on how to write correctly.

Then came high school and computers were now ubiquitous. We all switched to some bastardization of typed cursive. Kind of like writing a computer font with more ligatures. Looks like chicken scratch, is hard to read, works okay.

Biggest thing we dropped were all the cursive characters that don’t look like their typed counterparts.

Had similar experiences in Hungary. Cursive style enforced throughout grades 1-4, with a strictly defined stroke order for each letter. Even for numbers. The bottom stroke in 2 is crooked, as well as the top stroke in 7, and God forbid you leave out the line through the middle.

Even when I was in high school, one of my classmates once lost points on a test because he wrote his name in all capitals but dared put a dot on the letter i.

I was also taught in a similarly pedantic manner in the Midwest. Although if I was ever marked off for it I'm sure it wasn't to the extent of Japanese perfectionism.

I wonder if this is a problem in India too. I have seen multiple Sanskrit textbooks insist on writing devanagari with the right stroke order, and the right direction left–right or vice versa, even though with a modern ballpoint pen the final result will look the same anyway. Does that same pedanticism carry over into teaching of the modern languages like Hindi?

Having learned multiple Devanagari languages at school (including both Sanskrit and Hindi), I don't recall being explicitly taught stroke order as such. There's an intuitive way to write most Devanagari characters that usually corresponds to the "preferred" order you mention, which is only apparent in serif Devanagari fonts anyway. But for example, I have no idea what the preferred order is for U+0918 घ, and never learned one as such.

Side note: since you mentioned ballpoint pens, (at least 10+ years ago, things might be different now) we weren't allowed to use a standard ballpoint pen/biro; fountain pens were preferred and micro-point ink or gel pens were allowed.

I learned handwriting under the tutelage of a very stern French teacher. She seemed to genuinely enjoy inflicting The Ruler™ on that back of even a slightly exuberant student's knuckles. It was not a fun experience, although I do think that barred 7's make for better legibility, so it wasn't all for naught!

Bah.

We were monitored for correctly pointing the back of a pen directly into our right shoulder joint. If it didn't point there, you didn't do it right. Luckily, we also had a guy who was a lefty, so that was a blasphemy of a much higher order and let most of us, the incorrect pen holders, fly well under the radar.

Italy: my 15yo kid has such atrocious writing, I'm embarrassed to even call it chicken scrawl. How the teachers decode eg any of 47 ways of scratching the letter 'a', or indeed any others, i have no idea. I've been complaining about it since the kid was 5, and just silently seething for the last 5 years. Other battles to fight.

I watched my son have an A/B test. His school was bilingual (German/English): English was taught by non-German teachers, in English only (starting in grade 1); some of the teachers couldn't even speak German (how does that work?).

All the subjects except English require the kids to use fountain pens and of course use the German letterforms. The kids' handwriting was clear as a bell right from grade 1. In the beginning they had workbooks that also showed the stroke order.

By contrast, although supposedly the same rules applied in English (foundation pens and German letterforms), in practice the English teachers didn't care what writing implement was used and paid no attention to handwriting whatsoever. As a result these same kids drew often illegible scrawls when writing English which they could otherwise speak, read, and type just fine.

Fun trivia: The first graders learnt one letter of the alphabet each week; in English this was "A" the first week, "B" the second etc while in German it was frequency order (R, S, and E were among the first few IIRC)

I'm guessing the English-speaking teachers came from a less formal background. In the U.S. while form isn't typically handled in a strict way, many materials include suggested strokes and while there isn't any "standard" instruction in the U.S., handwriting lessons are common, including details like proper grip. But the goal is only legible handwriting, not a particular form, and teachers will often emphasize that form changes over time and that different approaches are OK.

How does German instruction handle left-handed kids?

Bilingual school hints towards a private school, so you might be right. German education is actually strict around who is teaching and even private schools have to follow a public curriculum.

Lefties have special pens, as we generally learn writing with foundation pens which would smear for a leftie. Sometimes I remember lefties (and righties?) using blotting paper to prevent smears.

In the 90s you still had some lefties being forced to write with their right hand. I assume they are now allowed to write with ball pens that don’t smear. All the lefties I know in my generation have an awkward writing position in order to prevent smears. But generally the way you write an „N“ doesn’t differ. You start on the left bottom -> up -> right bottom -> up.

German here:

You generally start with easy letters like „o,i,a,m,n“. With those you already can form words like „Mama“ or „Mami“ (mum) / „Oma/Omi“ Grandma. They are easy to write, especially capital M and N.

Then you quickly learn all the other vowels and more frequent consonants. Often letters are taught as syllables or in common combinations as well. I think Q and Y are probably one of the last ones you learn. I actually remember a dictate from third class where none in class remembered how a capital Y.

I tried to find a good source for the order of letters, but finding a primary school book for free online is hard. There might be subtle differences between books or regions. (eg if you live in Quedlinburg learning Q might be more important than in Berlin). Every state has it’s own school plans and schools choose their own books. The school book lobby is really strong and they make so much money off of this stuff.

Source: Mom is a elementary school teacher.

> You generally start with easy letters like „o,i,a,m,n“

Thanks (to you or your mum :-) -— it’s been about 20 years since he started Schule so I forgot the precise detail. Unlike him or his mum I grew up in Australian English so started ABC but was struck by the different ordering.

In general I found the German school system to be quite good!

As someone who learnt how to write the 'German' way, I can assure you that my 'clear as a bell' handwriting deteriorated as soon as the teacher did not care about strokes anymore (3rd grade primary school IIRC).

I now write in a mix of cursive and non-cursive that is only legible to myself for no more than 2 minutes after I have written it down... :)

Same here. I always joke that I decided to become a doctor early on, went into CS and all that is left from my plans is the handwriting.

I remember from 3rd to 6th grade we had „Werken“ ( handicrafts, wood working) lessons and we had to write perfect non-cursive „Druckschrift“ (Block letters) in the „technical documents“ and „drawings“

An interesting side effect of Japanese stroke order (at least with Japanese characters) is that character recognition for dictionary apps etc is based around stroke order. If you mess up the stroke order badly enough then it won't recognize the character at all.

I've noticed this pattern too.

For example, try to draw the character 口 on the 'draw' functionality on jisho.com -- the correct stroke order is (cardinal directions for 3 strokes): 1. NW -> SW 2. NW -> NE -> SE 3. SW -> SE. If you try to do it any other way it will fail.

If this is a problem for you (e.g. learning Japanese and don't know stroke orders and/or don't care to learn them exactly) -- the Google Translate handwriting input for Japanese does not have this behavior (or at least as much) and will effectively recognize your incredibly shittily reproduced kanji.

Maybe those old dictionary software hold kanji as graphs internally and search as hierarchical trees. That would be far faster and more accurate than comparing 酒酉西 out of bitmaps as long as the user knows the order...

╷

┌

┌┐

口

the second stroke of 口 goes right from your first glyph ╷ to the third glyph ┌┐

said another way, your second glyph ┌ doesn't appear in the "correct stroke order" because the top+right sides of the 'mouth' are drawn in one stroke.

I expect their list is for ordering, not individual stroke. If you only put ╷ and ┌┐ you could get to the second by starting at the bottom right. The alternative would be to list individual strokes e.g. ╷, ┐, ─. Or to use bolding but it's really hard for me to notice that┍┓is BOX DRAWINGS DOWN LIGHT AND RIGHT HEAVY followed by BOX DRAWINGS HEAVY DOWN AND LEFT. Plus it still doesn't really specify stroke order.

  ╷  Down
  ┌┐  Right, down
  口  Right

Because this is so ingrained in me from learning chinese, this is how i draw all my boxes as well when prototyping in the whiteboard. And same, you end up with that inverted acute trapezoid shape once you start going fast.

A Japanese tweet/blog aiming to stir up outrage among the “concerned” Japanese public, being taken up by an English-language website for their latest “weird Japan” article.

Being Japanese myself I can share countless horror stories about how English is taught here, but crap article is crap.

Can confirm that "weird Japan" is the usual variety of story on the blog, but I posted this one after seeing it elsewhere and this article seemed to sum it up well.

In reality a teacher wouldn't dock you points for writing the alphabet in the wrong order? If so perhaps the post should be deleted.

Knowing the state of English education here I wouldn’t be entirely surprised if the story was true, especially seeing how the original blog post was written by a tutor in (rather rural) Fukui. I’ve never experienced anything like this myself, but some teachers truly are clueless.

However it’s quite a bit of a stretch to call these “Japanese rules for writing your ABCs”. The tweet wouldn’t have gotten 15k likes and retweets if this was a widespread occurrence or the standard way people are taught English here. It’s shocking and outrageous, that’s what made it viral.

yeah it's a RocketNews story... I wonder what would be the equivalent to RocketNews/Gigazine/itanew in English world, Sputnik US maybe?

What's the problem? Every country has its quirks. You could write plenty of things about how the US is weird.

This is so true.

When I learned to write (French) when I was a child, the teacher also gave us strict guidelines to the order and shape of the characters. I don't see any difference except that in my country, most people stop caring about it once the exam has passed.

Japan is awesome when you really dive into the culture and language and try to understand it. If you don't, you'll probably have a hard time (hence the number of expats ranting about anything and everything, I guess).

I always wondered why it is always the target for articles about "weird stuff". You can find weird people and concepts in any country if you search for it long enough...

Stroke order is the only reason cursive Japanese/Chinese can even exist, your cursive would look nothing like mine if we used different stroke orders. Never mind the nightmare of teaching 100m (or a billion Chinese) to write thousands of pretty complex characters if there wasn’t a canonical way to do it.

Also, it makes sense semantically. Most characters consist of several “subcharacter” that also exist in their own right, so you definitely want to write them as units.

It’s a fundamentally flawed comparison.

This article isn’t about writing kanji. It’s about writing the letters A, O, k, etc.

As others posted, cursive is the same deal in most european countries.

Anecdotally this is why I can’t read most adult cursive writing, as I bailed very early to “print” like handwriting. I have no notion of how the letters flow and it just looks like messed up coils to me.

Well the idea is the same, but since a Latin letter only has 2 or 3 strokes, rather than 10, it’s a completely different story.

A lot of the cursive forms are pretty similar to dragging the pen while writing in block letters, with exagerated loops and a slant. F's are weird though.

Contrarily, there is no One True Stroke Order to write cursive Japanese or Chinese. See for example 亦 http://www.sfzd.cn/shufa6/7550d88277ef1dc2f2bb5f4c1bdf64018....

Some authors analyze it as the bottom 火 component to be written as four dots, while later authors increasingly analyze it in the form you see today, where the middle strokes are written first.

Today, those who do not take up calligraphy recognize only the latter form and order.

There is a general tendency for some strokes to be written before others, but nothing is set in stone.

If I'm writing something that anyone other than I might need to read I tend to use single-stroke gothic technical lettering. That also has a strict stroke order, but it's very different from what the article describes. EG "O" is two strokes, one starting at the upper-left and curving counter-clockwise towards the lower right, the second starting at the upper-left and curving clockwise towards the lower right. Here[1] is a good reference to the capital letters.

[1] https://designbuildacademy.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/En...

Two random thoughts (and coming from the point of view that I am a fan of some aspects of Japanese culture):

1) You start to wonder whether such training to follow stroke order, "staying within the lines", is a reflection or contribution even to the rules-following society that Japan is?

2) I am sure many have written about it before, but I have never dug into it -- why is it that when you see English rendered on a Japanese website, it's always in a Courier-era font that is instantly recognizable? (highly pixelated, wireframe looking font). Is it lack of interest in development of English fonts for Japanese audiences? Is there some deep incompatibility in the page / paragraph rendering "technology"? At the same time, Japanese / Chinese characters in Japanese websites do have the equivalent of people designing different fonts (stroke widths, curvatures, styles, etc) -- why is English special (and badly rendered)?

1) Partly. But in this case it’s also for very practical reasons, it makes teaching and learning much simpler, and it makes cursive writing possible. It wouldn’t be without strict stroke order.

There are good reasons for this. It's not just Japanese - for example, anyone who has ever ordered cheap Chinese electronics from Amazon will be familiar with the terrible fonts/weird letter spacing they use in the English part of the manual.

Most Japanese fonts include characters for the roman alphabet for the sake of compatibility, but they're usually 1. monospaced, as most Japanese fonts are monospaced and having bits of non-monospaced text in a block of monospaced text is a bad idea, and 2. very low effort, as they just exist for compatibility so that any English text that needs to be rendered in this font doesn't end up as gibberish.

This wouldn't be an issue if people switched to a different font when they want to write something in English, but the reality is they often don't, and that's how you end up with these awful looking bits of English text. Most people just type things up with whatever the default font is in whatever app they're writing in, and in the case of Japanese and Chinese people writing bits of English, that's the ugly character set that exists for the sake of compatibility.

It's certainly not an issue of not knowing any better - just like you can instinctively tell a beautifully rendered Kanji from an ugly computer font one, they can do the same for English. I have seen Japanese technical documents, restaurant menus, etc with beautiful typography for the English bits. It's just that for most cases it's not worth worrying about to the people making the things.

Regarding your other question, there two good reasons for drawing Kanji with the correct stroke order. 1. It makes them much easier to remember. This is important when there's thousands of them. If you want to know a bit more about this, read the introduction to Heisig's "Remembering the Kanji". I learned 3000 of them in about 3-4 months, and primitives/stroke order were essential to achieving this. 2. when reading kanji that were written with a brush (or even writing them quickly with a pen), you can see from the lines which order the strokes were written in, and it helps enormously with deciphering peoples handwriting.

> You start to wonder whether such training to follow stroke order, "staying within the lines", is a reflection or contribution even to the rules-following society that Japan is?

I've always wondered why different cultures have different relationships with rules and organization. I'm from Europe but spent my teenage years in Northern Africa and have been living in Mexico for over a decade. I think about this all the time.

My totally unscientific hypothesis is that it's all about the climate and geographical regions.

For example, northern European countries tend to be a lot more organized than tropical countries. In Northern Europe one wouldn't survive next winter without organization, while in tropical countries there is food all year round.

As for Japan I always thought that this almost obsession with order, details, and rituals comes from their lack of space for agriculture. Japan has few plains and lots of mountains so by necessity they had to learn to cultivate in difficult spaces to survive. This attention to detail is everywhere in their culture compared to, say, Latin America or Africa.

In Mexico particularly there is almost an aversion to rules and imposed restrictions which in turn creates all sort of weird behaviors. A Mexican friend always argues this is in fact a perduring trauma from the Spanish conquest, but I argue that this doesn't happen in other countries.

As an American, I definitely remember being taught these rules in elementary school and then just never having a teacher care beyond maybe one test. Which seems to be how the Japanese English teacher is also handling things.

I believe similarly strict rules were observed for cursive writing when it was still being taught.

I wonder whether such interminable busy-work is an emergent feature of educational institutions arising naturally as a result of how they are structured.

No I think in Japan they do it just to keep consistency with stroke order requirements for their other writing systems. They don’t want exceptions.

Before most people typed, having at least reasonable handwriting was arguably a fairly useful skill. (Arguably, learning shorthand would probably have been equally useful for many but "clerical skills" were looked down upon in a lot of curricula.)

That said, handwriting (Palmer script) was consistently my worst grade in elementary school and it's basically non-existent today.

Fun fact: The stroke order for the upper left symbol of Hidari (左) (meaning: left) and Migi (右) (meaning: right) is different. If you get the stroke order wrong you won't be accepted on the Kanji Proficiency Test (Kanji Kentei).

More info: in 左, you'd draw the horizontal line first, while in 右 the slanted vertical line goes first.

That is super weird and looks like it's a Japanese-ism only: Chinese has no such difference: https://strokeorder.com.tw/%E5%8F%B3.html

There are several cases where the Japanese and Chinese stroke orders are different for the exact same character.

Note that post you linked has different orders between the animation and the static image.

If I'm not wrong, TW stroke order agrees with the JP order. CN standardized the stroke orders of many gylphs against calligraphic tradition.

The TW stroke order in this case is more aligned with calligraphic tradition: see http://www.sfzd.cn/shufa6/2495714749c131513682e1a3f8e08fa62.... vs. http://www.sfzd.cn/shufa6/46625e0c6c9573d8b78056cc8919c64b6.... where the calligraphic forms make the stroke order clear.

It's also weird for Japanese, typically the stroke order adheres to a certain logic, althought there are many exceptions (very roughly: top to bottom, left to right, trace a horizontal line before crossing it, do one stroke at a time, except for right angles angling downwards on the right).

Yep, same here in Russia:

https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn%3AANd9GcQmxq...

https://ds03.infourok.ru/uploads/ex/07bc/000585fb-26570f7b/h...

(wow I completely forgot how to write Ж the right way...)

Except literally no one will care if you change the order of the strokes after you graduate from elementary.

Quick question: When I dabbled in learning Russian some time ago, my materials stressed that handwriting in Russia is primarily cursive. Schools in America have deemphasized/removed cursive writing from their curriculum. Has Russia seen similar trends in education/usage of cursive writing?

No, if you write in russian you write in cursive. Some people adapt their "style" to make it easier for them (for example using "т" instead of its cursive counterpart) but I can't imagine anyone writing (or leaching how to write) like this: "мама мыла раму".

This would also have the whole healthcare system destroyed. Can you imaging a doctor putting down letters you can tell from each other?

Thanks!

One thing to note is that Russian italics usually take the letter forms of Russian cursive. Some of these look completely different than the block letter (think Latin Q or Z vs their cursive counterparts), so you have to be able to read it for more than just handwriting.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_cursive#/media/File:Cy...

Is this widely taught in Russia? I took some Russian in college and asked multiple professors about non-cursive writing and I was always told it basically doesn't exist.

>I was always told it basically doesn't exist.

pretty much. Non-cursive is used when filling out forms though. I think that's one the exceptions.

>Is this widely taught in Russia?

That's what you start you school years with. First just lines, then characters. And yes, you have to put them down as shown (poor lefties!). And you do it in a special notebook called "прописи" which has horizontal and tilted vertical lines (and dotted guides to start with): https://static.my-shop.ru/product/f2/383/3821575.jpg

So yeah, not only only you are supposed to draw those lines in a specific order, your characters should be tilted at a certain angle.

Stroke order is very important in English if you will learn cursive/script (joining your letters).

The New Zealand curriculum in 2012 was[1]:

  Years 1&2 Learn letter formation.
  Years 3&4 Cursive writing via teaching ligatures – the joins to the letter.
  Years 5&6 Learning to join letters.
  Years 7&8 Joined up writing.

Standard printed alphabets in New Zealand classrooms had small arrows and numbers to show stroke order, although maybe it isn’t taught any more?

In the article they show how to draw a capital O, and option 1 is definitely correct (from top, counterclockwise), and the Japanese version (option 2) is simply wrong. Without the groundwork of drawing the letter strokes in the correct order, you cannot learn cursive easily (or it will just look wrong).

An example is a lower case x, where it was taught as: top left semicircle to bottom left then top right semicircle to bottom right (with the two half circles touching in the middle). If the little x is taught to be formed this way, then one can easily learn to write the script x correctly and legibly.

Edit: I painted a wall in my home with blackboard paint so friends can draw on it, and yesterday I was writing notes on it, and I immediately dropped into using cursive (even though I only occasionally write by hand now). I admit it wasn’t that readable (only just by me!) Disclaimer: I am middle aged and I went to a more conservative school - I have no idea of how many NZers can write cursive although most people older than me certainly do in my experience.

[1] http://teachingnz.com/2017/07/22/should-schools-still-teach-...

>An example is a lower case x, where it was taught as: top left semicircle to bottom left then top right semicircle to bottom right (with the two half circles touching in the middle). If the little x is taught to be formed this way, then one can easily learn to write the script x correctly and legibly.

In the US, I was taught to form the lower-case x as two straight lines in block letters. When we got to cursive, the correct way was to draw a hump where the x should be, and come back at the end of the word to add the crossing stroke, like is done for t’s and i’s.

Such an ignorant article, with the usual undercurrent of sycophantic nippohphilia. I'm so tired of sycophants on the internet pointing at some Japanese cultural 'thing' they have observed, in this case from reading someone else's blog, and presenting it to the world as though it is some unique discovery from the treasure trove of wonderful Japanese eccentricities.

This is not exclusive to Japan. Learning to write in also China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Korea, and Thailand to begin with, stroke order matters. They carry over the same instruction technique when they teach English.

There's a word for that! "Nihonjinron" [1]

While the medium of internet blogposts and perceived sycophantic motivations may be more modern, this kind of "Japanese exceptionalism" has been common enough in writing to warrant its own genre. While nihonjinron does include works prior to the Meji Restoration,

> The concept became popular after World War II, with books and articles aiming to analyze, explain, or explore peculiarities of Japanese culture and mentality, usually by comparison with those of Europe and the United States.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nihonjinron

I changed my calligraphy after I was an adult. I was inspired by this NYT OpEd: https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/interactive/2009...

What impressed me was that there are more efficient ways to make your strokes. Some ways make your hand move less. Do You know any study about it?

I went to public school in the US in the 90s, and I learned to write just like that NYT piece. Did you learn differently?

I'm not American :-)

Along the lines of correct stroke ordering, I learned from a colleague that studied a large amount of Japanese that they had used a visual dictionary for translating Kanji to English that both allowed you to draw the symbols and required the symbols to be drawn in the correct order. It seems similar to the base requirement for looking up how to spell a word in the dictionary; you have to have some idea of how the word is formed before you can find the full answer.

For Japanese characters, stroke order definitely affects how easy it is to draw a correct-looking character, so it makes sense to be picky about it.

But for English, it simply doesn't matter as much. It's not like they use the same kind of drawing input to look up words in an English dictionary, either.

Many “draw a character” input methods actually don't care at all how the resulting character looks and only use the order and direction of the strokes to generate set of matching characters. Similar idea is IIRC also used to order and collate characters in paper dictionaries.

I'm second generation Japanese-American. I read the article. I learned both languages in USA.

I just realized that I've been writing English my whole life with a stroke order.

Strictly speaking, everyone has a stroke order. It's just that they may not be consciously aware of it, because it doesn't matter to them.

Crucially not everyone has a consistent stroke order. I find myself writing letters in different ways depending on my mood etc.

I mean to say, with the same stroke order as you would write a Japanese character.

Eh, depends on your school? In NYC, I went to a public school where they were pretty strict and repetitive with teaching basic writing down to the stroke direction...

I had penmanship in elementary school. Lot's of boring repetitions filling class time, cursive as well. We all forgot about it later on like some mild trauma that we collectively buried. I actually remember feeling surprised when I didn't have to use cursive in college. I'm not saying that all the emphasis on nitpicks was ever good and I'm definitely not shedding any tears but there are definite signs that we're losing knowledge of the handwritten tradition. See this humorous Language Log post as an example:

https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=3489

Stroke order is very important when writing kanji, for good reason: it helps memorize the characters and also makes them look well-balanced. Also, trying to read cursive Japanese or Chinese is a futile endeavor if you don't know the stroke order. So it's only natural the Japanese would impose a stroke order for latin letters as well.

I got a 100% on the test by systematically choosing the way most dissimilar to how I would write each letter.

Stroke order for radicals (部首) is important, but IMO precise stroke order isn't so important (example: how to write "口").

口 is a radical, so your argument is DOA.

Some characters have more than one stroke order, and some characters are commonly written in a wrong order. I remember a Japanese TV program asking people on the street to write 馬 (horse), and making fun of people writing it in the wrong order. I guess it would be like a reporter asking people to spell "definitely" or "embarrassment" -- you're bound to get lots of wrong answers.

But I disagree on 口, it just doesn't look right when you don't use the correct stroke order. It shouldn't be a perfect square or rectangle any more than the letter O should be written as a ge○metrically perfect circle or ellipse.

I would note that to the extent that schools enforce a stroke order, these stroke orders are somewhat arbitrary, and concerns more with legibility, pedagogy, and, for some, enforcing it for the sake of enforcing it rather than an actual tradition.

In the first place, even for identical characters, the way different Han-character writing countries have standardized their stroke order (to the extent that they have) may differ. Even with this, the stroke order may differ from the mainstream stroke order of the carefully-written Kaishu calligraphic style.

And with more cursive calligraphic styles, the writers have more freedom to change the stroke order, choose alternative strokes, choose even alternative forms and traditions of the gylph (think straight r vs. r rotunda) for speed and expression; even, say, mainstream Xingshu (Running-script) regularly chooses a different stroke order and variant strokes from Kaishu.

One sad result of this is that many writers of Han characters who do not then pursue calligraphy then believe that there is one correct way to write characters, and come to perpetuate and foist a baseless fiction upon others, and in some respects, judge others by it.

There is a curious symmetry in that the average Westerner is just as ignorant about calligraphy as the average Japanese is ignorant about typography.

In Japan this is reflected everywhere in choice and typesetting of Western fonts. Products, websites, newspapers, business cards.

It is almost a monoculture in choice of fonts and completely devoid of any microtypography or typesetting rules unless helped by stuff built into software.

The enforcememt of rules that essentially lock a student into a narrow and arbitrary ‘standard’ character set for their handwriting reflect the lack of understanding of the important role typography plays in Western communication and how your style of written letters is an expression of personality.

This is regrettable as handwriting of Western type is probably the closest ‘intersection’ with the art of calligraphy that has deep roots in Japanese culture.

As someone who studied typography and loves to do calligraphy doodles all the time and who helped digitize quite a few handwritings into fonts I’m saddened by this.

But having lived & worked in Japan, certainly not surprised.

How do you teach children to form characters without being this specific? I remember being taught in a similar way here in the US.

Here's one example:

https://i.pinimg.com/originals/b7/71/9b/b7719b586e646f77c743...

I think when you're initially teaching how to write characters, yeah there's a stroke order, but people mostly just care about the writing being clear/legible/neat, not specific strokes being in order.

I agree, but most of the examples in the article aren't the same same strokes in different orders, but different strokes altogether.

The article briefly mentions the reason for this: Kanji. English has 26 letters which are all fairly distinct from each other even when written by a chicken on LSD.

Japanese has on the order of ~2,000 characters you need to know just to graduate high school, plus thousands more to read newspapers and advanced literature, and more still for names, places, and so on. Memorizing the stroke order isn't as important as some instructors make it out to be, but it can matter when trying to decipher hand-written Japanese and serves as an additional clue as to which maybe 10 ambiguous possiblities the writer was going for in a particular character.

Extending it to English seems kind of silly to us, but if the students are already taught about stroke order, and use it as a tool for memorization in their native language, it makes some sense to apply the concept to English.

Sorry to disagree with you, but I’m not sure it’s even possible to learn Japanese or Chinese characters without adhering to a strict stroke order. Not necessarily the one they use (although after 2000+ years of teaching you might suspect it’s pretty optimal) but you can’t teach your hand to memorise the movement if there’s no particular order. And since there are so many common elements between characters, you can’t really choose stroke orders for each of them individually either.

I'm fluent in Japanese and I stand by what I said: "Memorizing the stroke order isn't as important as some instructors make it out to be, but it can matter [in some cases]."

Also keep in mind that even native Japanese speakers struggle with Kanji, and more so with every passing year. Some of my Japanese friends with college educations struggle to even read some jouyou kanji, let alone write. With the aid of technology, modern Japanese fluency de-emphasizes the need for stroke order substantially.

But did you learn kanji without adhering to any particular stroke order?

I taught myself around 1000 characters and I found it impossible to learn to read them without learning to write them, which in turn relied on muscle memory. I’m pretty sure muscle memory plays a very important role for most learners.

I know that many young Japanese people rely on smartphones and other tech to avoid really learning kanji, but if anything that strengthens my point. It’s hard to learn to write them just by reading them, unlike English spelling for example.

>But did you learn kanji without adhering to any particular stroke order?

Yes, I learned almost entirely without learning the stroke order. I learned some basic stroke order rules which can be generally applied to many kanji/radicals and be correct enough 80% of the time. In total I spent maybe two hours on stroke order.

For the record, I can hardly hand-write Japanese in the first place, maybe only 200 kanji at most. It's not necessary, however, to hand-write Japanese these days. I can read a couple thousand Kanji, however. I had no problem memorizing them without a hand-written component.

80% is quite a lot. And my point was never that stroke order was hard to learn, i find it very natural moat of the time. Like you say, some basic principles cover almost all cases. Like spelling in languages like Spanish. What I’m arguing is that if you had no idea about stroke order, it would be very hard to remember how to write them at all. It would just be a meaningless heap of squiggles.

And sure you don’t have to be able to hand write these days, but for me that is one of the joys.

>What I’m arguing is that if you had no idea about stroke order, it would be very hard to remember how to write them at all.

Yes, but it's crucially not necessary for reading them. Writing literacy in Japanese is not a common skill even among native speakers and isn't really a requirement for modern fluency given that you can use a computer to do the remembering for you.

I think it comes down to what you're optimizing for, but disagree that stroke order is essential for learning to read. Like ddevault, I learned the jouyou kanji and some extras almost entirely without stroke order. I've never even tried to handwrite most of the kanji I know because I almost exclusively care about being able to read printed text, especially in contexts where tooling isn't available (image-format scans of paper things, inside old games, etc).

This is obviously anecdotal, but not having ever written most of the kanji/radicals I know didn't seem to hurt me much outside of having terrible handwriting (in the handful of occasions I ever have to handwrite in Japanese, the fact that I'm doing it at all seems to override nitpicks) and sometimes struggling to read sloppy/highly stylized handwriting (which is a valid issue).

If you enjoy handwriting/learning for learning's sake more power to you, but learning stroke order isn't necessarily an integral part of learning kanji if you don't mind the tradeoffs involved.

I learned all Joyo kanji purely visually via spaced repetition (Anki). I can't actually write them from memory because I don't learn the exact strokes, just the shape of it and some specific radicals that distinguish a kanji from similar ones. I also know the general stroke order algorithm, which I use when I need to input an unknown kanji from a book or a sign, but I just use kana input method for anything else.

I learned Chinese, for all intents and purposes, as an ABC living in the west. I was taught the traditional way with a brush and calligraphy. In this method, I would agree stroke order and direction is very important. With a physical brush, the initial plot creates a wider line than when the stroke ends.

Today, though, we use pencils and ballpoint pens. That initial thickness isn't reproduced. Why dose direction matter at that point? Most of the time you can't tell which direction I started my stroke.

So while I think the parent response raises a good point that stroke order and direction may have been important in the development of the culture, I agree with you that it's less important these days.

I agree with your broad point that stroke order need not be dogmatic to good writing, since if you look at Chinese calligraphy, it's also clear that stroke order is not set in stone.

Nevertheless, I think it would interest you that you can achieve very expressive line variation with even pencil and ballpoint; the trick is to write on a stack of paper so you can vary the area of contact between tip and paper: e.g. see https://www.bilibili.com/video/av21114247/

You can definitely tell stroke direction from a ballpoint pen, especially for short strokes and hooks, that often end with a very soft part.

But in any case, stroke order is very easy to learn. You’ll pick up a few basic principles like top first then bottom, left first the right, plus the stroke order for common parts like boxes, without effort. That takes you 90% of the way, remembering the few exceptions is easy too. For me as a learner I never saw it as a burden at all.

They're surprisingly silly. English developed completely separately from Japanese/Asia, so this teacher is pulling line-directions and rules out of her ass. There are no such conventions for the alphabet. Her poor students and their hand cramps, out there writing in courier.

Stroke order is an important part of writing in Japanese culture, with conventions. They aren't random. It is reasonable to a come up with a similar stroke ordering system for learning other languages in Japan. Calling them silly and pulled out of her ass is dismissive to the Japanese culture, the teacher, or the students.

Creating this Japanese overlay of rules for English writing is disingenuous. The students might be in for a minor shellshock outside of her class.

I respect the conventions they have for writing in Japanese, it's perfectly tailored to using a brush. The teacher should respect English conventions, the free-form, the cursive, either one.

> it's perfectly tailored to using a brush.

It isn't just using a brush; even with a pen and paper simple hiragana is easier when using proper stroke order.

> The teacher should respect English conventions

The teacher is following Japanese culture conventions to teach people of the Japanese culture a different language. People unfamiliar with the culture or the teacher should respect that.

The Latin alphabet does have historical developmental stroke directions, not by rules but by what's natural and possible using the historical Euro writing tool — a broad-cut reed or quill pen. In this sense the Japanese stroke order for Latin letters is wrong; you can't push a reed pen to write an ‘O’ that way.

Yeah, the "O" stood out to me as objectively wrong as well.

omg, that gives me memories about technical drawing course at my alma mater (National Technical University of Ukraine), where we were required to draw everything by hand, including fonts: http://docs.cntd.ru/picture/get?id=P0057&doc_id=1200003503&s..., http://docs.cntd.ru/document/1200003503, and were graded for the quality of it.

I remember I was taught a quite rigid way to write the alphabet when I went to elementary school in Austria and the quality of my writing being part of the grade. (And don't get me started on cursive) Thankfully that was mostly over sometime around middle school (although I was still required to write in cursive).

Side note: The A's in the first example both look wrong to me since you're supposed to write the first two lines in one go without raising the pen. Having a discontinuity in the top corner is IMO a worse stylistic error than the placement of the middle line.

A lot of people notice my "incorrect" writing style if they watch me (even for a moment). I start my O's from the bottom and go clockwise for example, among other differences for many other letters. I was definitely taught how I should be doing it, but my brain just wanted to do it a different way. I got some bad marks on some writing tests, but once that part of school was over, I was left alone for the most part.

I definitely learned a 'one true way' to write alphabetic letters in primary school. In the Netherlands. We had to write every letter in one stroke in one specific way. Then we learned to write whole words in one stroke. I was pretty terrible at it and was glad to be allowed to use 'block letters'. I don't know whether that was universal across schools here or whether they still do.

Wait is this for cursive or print characters?

I recall similar rules learning to letter old school "drafting" documents. Pointedly, I remember getting spot checked on how many strokes and in what order a B was written.

Granted, it serves even more purpose in Japanese. But I've always felt the fact was that writing is art, and great evidence that are can be taught in much more mechanical ways than most of us realize.

Makes sense, in a culture where stroke order is paramount, that when writing other languages they would still consider it important.

Heck, in Engineering drafting class we learned to letter in a very particular way. It took 4 strokes to letter a lower-case 'o' on a schematic.

> English teacher Hitomi Igarashi shared what she has learned to be the “correct Japanese way to write the alphabet” on her blog back in 2018, and it might surprise you.

Wish that blog was linked! (or I could find it)

While I'm wishing, a "Japanese way" handwritten font would be cool.

https://ameblo.jp/hitomi-nakahashi/entry-12376123961.html You'll have to click the translate button at the bottom. It covers more letters than the article, but not all.

I've recently started practicing calligraphy and, for each script, there is a prescribed stroke order (called a "ductus").

LOL. I remember how it threw me off guard when I was asked by young Chinese students about stroke order for the Latin alphabet. It really puzzled me and I had to google to confirm that THERE IS NO STROKE ORDER for the Latin alpahbet.

Yet, in Chinese (and Japanese I assume) there is. It is actually very very important. You actually won't be able to look up a character if you don't know with how many strokes to write it. It seems to be of no meaning for character recognition software, like Pleco.

As a lefty, with all the respect, everything that's written there is completely wrong, in fact mirror wrong

People still build wagon wheels too:

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCMgTlht-PsNniRIuaax4m8Q

Once upon a time it was a genuinely useful skill. Nowadays not so much.

Western handwriting used to be highly standardised; the style known as "copperplate" was taught in schools. To a certain extent joined-up writing forces a stroke order on you - the pen enters from the left, forms a continuous figure, and exits at the right to match up with the next character. Then you come back and cross the "t"s and dot the "i"s.

It is significantly harder to do it in this style if you're left-handed.

Other character sets and styles may be of interest: the classic "blackletter Gothic" (Fraktur, until banned by the Nazis) used for German. Cyrillic handwriting is also quite different from the normal standalone characters.

This stuff all comes from China originally. I'm Chinese so I know.

It's because Chinese characters use to be written with brushes and with brushes the stroke order of the lines is very important for legibility and beauty. See the pictures in the link, you'll understand: https://www.google.com/search?q=chinese+calligraphy&rlz=1C5C...

Just imagine what those characters will look like if you did strokes out of order...

This stroke order carried over to pen and pencil and also to japan after they adopted Chinese characters as Kanji and invented their own unique scripts called hiragana and katakana.

Even with a pencil, stroke order is still very important to Chinese characters, it's kind of like an accent in your writing. People can sense something is off with your writing if you wrote strokes out of order. It's still legible and can even be neat but people can sense something off with stroke order.

Japanese people are just taking stroke order and applying it to English.

Teaching children unnecessary rote memorization over creativity... Gotta start them early

It's too bad that memorization - as a tool - is so readily dismissed. I think it is immensely valuable and enables one to master complex material and establish insights that would not be readily available through other means.

I think its a false alternative to see it as memorization vs. creativity. I'd make the case that memorization provides a useful foundation for creativity. It enables one to command a large set of facts to then integrate them into new insights.

Definitely. The most creative artists, musicians, acrobats etc are not the ones that skipped learning the basics. Only when you mastered the basics very very thoroughly can you start being creative and innovative.

But, art fundamentals are not learned through rote repetition. There is a lot of practice, but it is supposed to be mindfull instead of rote and also is coupled with a lot of explanations of how things work and a lot of creative work. The usual drawing advice is complete opposite of what you suggest.

Playing instrument in classical school is learned through repetition, but this schooling is not producing composers nor people able to create new music nor improvise. It makes people able to perform increasingly difficult technical pieces someone else made. That is completely different goal and schooling.

Likewise, acrobats are not choreographs which is something completely different. Acrobacy does not lead to that.

Do you have any examples of brilliant innovative musicians that did not master the basics very thoroughly?

I don’t believe the commonly repeated idea that rote learning and repetition would somehow inhibit innovation. I’m quite sure it’s the opposite. Take Rodney Mullen, by far the most innovative skater ever, he practically created new school skateboarding. He’s a machine, completely mastered old school and is extremely consistent.

Except it’s not unnecessary at all, Japanese writing is fundamentally different from Latin, stroke order is crucial. And it’s probably not a coincidence that Japanese kids are among the smartest and best educated in the world.

Except for.. English. Where they score the worst out of all Asian nations.

Those other Asian nations also have stroke order rules for native writing. None of the apparent claims in this thread ("Stroke order stunts creativity!" "Stroke order shows/increases intelligence!" "Stroke order has negative correlation with English proficiency!") seem well-founded.

I don’t mean that stroke order boost intelligence, it’s not difficulty. I was talking about the japanese school system in general. Not that i think it’s perfect, but rote learning is not pointless.

This is so stereotyped an opinion that it's almost a joke -- although admittedly it's a hard opinion to refute, because there's arguments both ways. I won't downvote out of respect and that's not what downvoting is supposed to be for -- and in fact merits a response.

But I will say that for all of the US's desire to have creative kids, we pretty badly fail on bringing up basic education standards to anything close to what Japan (or other similar countries) have.

I'll offer my own caricatured view on modern US public K-6 education on the other extreme -- let's have the kids discover the most rudimentary rules of math on their own because our average teacher isn't able to handle a rigorous curiculum, and muddle through the basics because it "makes them feel good"!

Japan's weird anal-retentive method of primary and secondary education is hostile to language learning; it's bad enough here in Canada, where the typical anglo school will just as likely turn students away from the French language† as help them learn it, but Japan (among others) is on another level.

We know, empirically, that this is not the way that people acquire language; but somehow it is the core of almost every public education body's language curriculum.

† Do you know anyone who acquired French fluency by completing conjugation tables two hours a week for a decade?

No it’s not, it makes perfect sense for Chinese based scripts. And it works, look at their literacy rate.

All developed countries have literacy rates statistically indistinguishable from 100%, so I'm not sure it provides much evidence either way on the effectiveness of teaching styles.

Stroke order makes sense for 漢字, and to some extent for 仮名, but rigid calligraphy of this sort is not a necessity with English, it is a pure luxury, especially in this case, when it's just printing. That print lowercase a is not self-evidently “correct” in any sense, there is no history or reason behind printing an a that way, and you can make an argument that it causes unnecessary confusion with d to do so.

Also, precise stroke order isn't really that important for 漢字 either. Which of these has correct stroke order? https://qui.suis.je/drop/20200608_0001.webp

I’m not sure what you mean. Clearly the current forms of the lowercase letters are correct, what do you mean? Do you simply mean that they _could have_ looked differently? Sure.

I can’t open the link, but yes, stroke order makes a big practical difference for learning, and of course for cursive.

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