Also German, don’t remember if we learned four strokes way back when, but I also do my Ws and Ms in one stroke. Yup, start at the leftmost end and then just zig zag to the right. Thought that might be a cursive thing, since we learned that like half a year into first grade (I think?), but found this block letter stroke order list. (No clue if that’s in accordance to what’s taught in schools though.)
Nor there really is one in Japanese, right? Google for 「書き順 複数 ある 漢字」and you will promptly find dozens of pages explaining how there are several kanji with different acknowledged orders, kanji dictionaries that show contradicting orders (without ever mentioning the possibility of an alternative one) and how the current “standard order” (as in used in the school environment) comes from a source that says itself that 「本書に掲げられた以外の筆順で、従来行われてきたものを誤りとするものではない」.
And I’m not even mentioning the differences from Chinese and Japanese order, lol.
The thing is Japanese society as a whole is a bit more obsessed with finding the “right” (and thus labeling everything else “wrong”) than most people would find healthy, and that extends to other school subjects such as English and outside of the school environment too.
But that is too long a discussion for this post, lol.
People are forced to write the Latin alphabet in a strict way like that? Geez. That sounds like manufacturing obstacles for the sake of it. Of course, kids need structure, but correcting a native on stroke order for an alphabet that has many common options for stroke order is a d*ck move. And telling kids there is an official stroke order when there isn’t is just a lie.
I write d in a single stroke starting from the middle, like a delta or reverse 6. I wish someone tried “correcting” me. Especially a non-native. I’m not saying natives don’t make mistakes but made up “mistakes” really don’t count.
Same for me. We defo had to learn a specific way to write the alphabet, plus we learned cursive writing as well after that. It’s a once in your life lesson and I’d say I still write the letters the same way, though k is a letter I’ve varied how I write over time.
決まりは決まりです.
I start from the bottom and go up.
We did too and my kids are doing it now. It’s pretty much the same chart too, although teachers aren’t really strict on it if the letter looks right.
I didn’t realize until he was in high school that my oldest son did it his own way. He starts all his letters from the bottom. It looks weird to me but his handwriting is better than mine so 
I’m just going to jump in and say that I was taught a particular order for strokes in kindergarten or primary school (I think we all were), and I considered it a standard order. I also think that having some amount of standardisation can be important, because it really does help with recognition, especially when someone starts rushing or doesn’t pay much attention to legibility. (I mean, just as an example, to many people from English-speaking countries, the typical way of writing a ‘4’ in France looks like a 6. That shows how having a ‘typical’ order helps, even if in theory any stroke order works fine, including writing letters using clustered dots.) However, I guess there is no universal stroke order for the Latin alphabet, and the stroke order one chooses typically depends on what one intends to do with one’s writing. For example, people who write in cursive typically will follow a particular stroke order, because that’s often what flows mostly easily. However, there are variations even within cursive styles, meaning that even then, not everyone will write letters with the same stroke order.
do you have a picture/example?
My daughter (started school a few weeks ago) recently came home with this,* which we are encouraged to use to help her learn to form her letters.
I thought it was interesting that people talk above about the transition to cursive, because to some degree these are clearly designed to be cursive ready or pre-cursive (which forming a w in four strokes would not be!) On the other hand I have some issues. My wife and I couldn’t decide what “around the boot” meant in reference to the letter ‘b’ do you go clockwise or anti-clockwise? (I’ve found some other resources elsewhere that make this clearer!) I also don’t know whether these methods would do much to help with the easily reversed letters. Also I note it does encourage you to put the stalk on a letter ‘m’, which if you start from the bottom you presumably don’t.
*This isn’t her school, but it was the easiest I found to link to.
Numbers in general tend to be all over the place. Does your ‘4’ have two strokes or one? Do you cross your ‘7’? Does your ‘1’ have a long stroke in the beginning?
I don’t like to start writing from the botton, so my capital M is usually two strokes* (but I do W in one, because it starts at the top).
*or sometimes something in between - the retracing thing that @Ducklingscap mentioned.
Always feels like something is missing when I see the US version.
But yeah there are stroke orders for different writing systems, it’s just that we blend it a lot or simply forget about it. In primary school I was taught to write cursive and in that style words are joined together without lifting the pen. However then there was a transition to block letters, which is disjoined from each letter. So during secondary school my handwriting changed to something in between. In university I also adopted some slight changes to handwriting to mimic my teachers and also to remove ambiguity some more. My v’s and r’s still need some work…
They would always ask me why I put a little tail on a lowercase “q”, but didn’t actively correct me ever, but maybe I didn’t work with them enough for them to feel comfortable correcting me though (I taught my own class without them, I would help them out on my off day though in their classes). They also asked me why I wrote my 7’s with a cross through it (I am American not European and I learned this from my 4th grade teacher so older Americans used to do this too). It seemed they were more curious about my handwriting quirks so I got lucky. I could see this happening with some other teachers I met though.
That IS strange, but if the result is good, why not? But, how does it work from an efficiency point of view? 
Even if you don’t know stenography, certain styles of writing might be slower or faster right. I was always thinking that what I have is pretty optimal - though my handwriting gets real ugly when I write fast. 
Ohhhhhh, that Japanese stroke order seems to be referencing technical lettering! Which true, I think we did learn that stroke order too, in technical school. (And then we learned how to use computer programs to create technical drawings and quickly forgot about which pencil to use for which line lol. Aside from the three poor apprentices who were made to write all their weekly reports in technical lettering…)
Note how even for standardised technical lettering the below image offers different options to write N, M and 8.
(https://fi.pinterest.com/sebastianw0620/aea-graphic-design/)
Same. I still use a cursive capital-I (as in Ink) to disambiguate it from lower-case l (as in letter).
Case in point
He writes pretty fast but, as expected, he doesn’t get to write very often these days. Even my elementary school kids are getting issues laptops although most of their homework is still handwritten.
My 1s and 7s look like the ‘Europe’ examples in your picture. My 4… I write it with two strokes. I have no idea how to do it with one stroke without it potentially being illegible (in my opinion). (But then again, I picked up a book for French kindergarteners before coming to France so I could learn how one is expected to write in France, even if I know few people really follow the models given to children.
I definitely was taught a specific stroke order for the English alphabet in elementary school, because I remember my teachers trying to correct me on how I wrote a few letters. I think they let it go eventually because I managed to make the letters look good enough that it didn’t matter how I was writing them.
Stroke order does matter, though, if you are trying to write English with very good handwriting. If you ever try any western calligraphy, you will likely be greeted with charts like this:
If you want your letters to match either of these styles, you will have to write not only the right stroke order, but also be using the right type of pen, and be holding it at the right angle. Consistency is extremely important if you want beautiful writing.
But this isn’t really applicable for most everyday use of English in the modern day, since quality of handwriting isn’t as important as it used to be. But since English has many different styles of handwriting that are considered equally valid ways to write the letters, there isn’t really a universal stroke order. Though I think it’s common for children to be taught one style of writing in elementary school just to give them something to start with that is readable to others.
This is a normal 6
I’m european apparently? (￢_￢)
