As a right-handed person from a right-to-left script (which means we all learn to write the way left-handed people from left-to-right scripts should), these really help on cutting down on Weird Writing Stuff:
Also, fast-drying pens so you don’t smudge everything … /o\
Well colour me impressed, your first advice, whilst feeling very strange to apply, is actually really working lol.
Tilting my paper helps as well, but I have trouble imagining the kanji from that angle (have to train that I suppose).
Thanks for the help !
Glad to help! I always hear horror stories lefthanded people who are never given proper instruction when learning how to write. This should help writing in English too, and not just Japanese.
The tilting thing doesn’t need to be extreme, just enough so there’s an angle/distance between your pinky and the wet ink. I tend to write fairly tilted (about 45 degrees right), but you should look for an angle that works for you. 
ETA: this will also help very much with spiral bound notebooks!
Underwriting-wise, watch out not to strain your straightened knucle. If you lock it, it will hurt. Relaxing it (veeeery slight curve, almost invisible) will help.
Both things will take practice though, because old habits die hard…
It does if you’re going to hand write stuff for other people to read, apparently.
In regular japanese courses around here it’s a big deal to learn the proper stroke order, and I had several teachers who could tell if you didn’t.
The answer is … kind of no, but also, for legibility, yes. Even the sloppy shorthand native-writers develop stems from proper stroke order, so if you’re going about it in any other way, you’ll probably produce writing less legible to natives.
I’ve also found, now that I’ve finally started doing writing practice, that it actually helps immensely in writing the kanji with the proper proportions, etc. I don’t know why. It just magically does.
As book knowledge stroke order does not matter hardly at all.
If you can get it into muscle memory, it is useful. It matters in the sense that it makes kanji more likely to be legible and easier to look up in a dictionary. But you can get a legible result with a different order, so it’s not essential. You can absolutely get by without it or by looking it up on the fly.
My lecturer at uni was left-handed, but as a child she was forced to learn to write right-handed. On the plus side, it meant she was the only person in the staff who could eat lunch (using chopsticks in the left hand) and mark tests simultaneously.
This sounds about right to me.
Do non-written characters (printed characters, any instances of three-dimensional likenesses of characters, etc.) have to be made according to these rules?
Personally, stroke order helps me a lot. Writing seems a lot easier and smoother. If I don’t use just one specific stroke order for each kanji, I tend to write it in all kinds of orders, something I find slow and confusing. So, even if the kanji looks right to the reader, it costs me a lot of energy to write it if I don’t stick to a specific stroke order, whatever that may be. (I imagine one could make up one’s own order.) Just my experience…
I think the stroke orders were developed centuries ago and might only apply to handwritten characters. As for ways to make characters in other ways, well, I have no idea if there are special rules for those or not. Wish I could be more helpful.
I’m left-handed, and write with my left hand, but I use chopsticks right-handed, so it’s good to know that I’ve inadvertently given myself a handy skill should I ever decide to become a teacher in a fit of madness!
If you write a kanji according to the stroke order, it will tend to look a certain (standard) way. Especially if you use a brush, a left-to-right brush stroke will appear differently than a right-to-left brush stroke. Printed characters (for example computer fonts) are based on the standard look of kanji.
The importance of stroke order is only emphasized when you’re reading handwritten texts from those who are not blessed with good writings skills, lol. (A lot of Japanese I encountered are like this actually). Also, when you’re looking for a Kanji you don’t know how to read and/or the meaning, by using an electronic jisho, you need to write it by stroke since it is programmed to recognize stroke orders. Other than that, it is just easier to remember them by stroke orders, especially if you learned them from radicals.
It matters in the long run. Stroke order will help when memorizing the harder Kanji down the rode. Being able to read Kanji is great, however being able to write is also important when learning a language you want to become proficient at. If your goals for Japanese are only to speak I would not worry, however I think it’s a good habit to follow stroke order. If stroke order did not matter there would be no stroke order to begin with.
Or from those who are very blessed with good writing skills (a.k.a. calligraphers).
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