Learning kanji stroke orders

This is what my chrome looks like after lessons.
Do you guys do this too?

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Certainly used to be like that! But then I found a browser extension called yomi-chan that can show you information about a word or kanji with just a click of a button. As you can see in the photo below the pop-up shows the stroke order of a kanji too! So no more tons of kanji tabs open anymore :grin:

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Thank you very much <3

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Alternatively there’s a userscript to automatically add it to lessons and item pages.

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Here’s what you can do as well

Just replace the Kanji character with the one you want.

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A purely Japanese site for this is Kakijun. However, I honestly think that Jisho and WK userscripts’ kanji diagrams are much easier to use.

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That is amazing!

What’s annoying is that the rules for more complex kanji are somewhat arbitrary. 學 is written with the two X’s first while 興 is written with the left comb first.

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I know that 學 is not used any more and it has been simplified to 学, but it illustrates the fact that beyond the simple rules such as “left to right”, “up to down”, it can get random.

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In fact, even the relatively simple rules can trip up kanji teachers. This one’s from an old TV show 「漢字遊び」, hosted by 岸本裕史 - Wikipedia

He’s pointing out common kanji mistakes, and in the process he makes a mistake himself: switching the 5th and 6th strokes of the kanji 服

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Which rules would these be? (I’m asking because I’m trying to see which rule he did or didn’t follow.)

I have to say though, I personally… probably write 服 like that as well? I’m not completely certain, but it didn’t strike me as horribly wrong in any case. I’ll be trying to switch over to the standard stroke order since it does feel a little more natural if I do it for 报 (simplified Chinese version of 報), but let’s just say… it’s not too weird. That aside, this probably doesn’t help the situation much, but I know for certain that in Chinese, 楷書 (standard script) and 行書 (semi-cursive) often use different stroke orders. In Japanese, that doesn’t seem to happen as much because most of their stroke orders are already the same as the ones for 行書. In short, all I can say is that stroke order is ultimately something agreed upon by convention, often for ergonomic reasons, but not always, and in all honesty, switching the order of a few strokes that are physically adjacent to each other (and close to each other in terms of stroke order) will not hinder legibility. The point of standard stroke orders, in my opinion, is just to ensure that kanji are relatively easy to write quickly, while remaining recognisable. People are going to forget parts of stroke orders at some point though, even native speakers.

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It’s the rule that I mentioned in that post, about 5th and 6th strokes. The rule is the same for hanzi as well.

(I just learned today that it’s called the seal radical. Kiss from a rose?)

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Oh. Wait, but is that based on some general rule about stroke order in kanji, or is he just not following the standard stroke order? I mean, I realise after looking it up that the right half of 服 is supposed to be written like that even in other kanji where it appears, but I don’t know of any general rule that suggests that it should be written that way.

I have this vague impression that stroke order sometimes isn’t preserved when things are combined, but I guess it works here. Just to explain how the error might have happened though, there’s something fairly similar: 皮, and the leftmost stroke is written first in Japanese.

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I’m not saying that writing a kanji with the wrong stroke order will render it illegible. I’m also not implying that native speakers never make any mistakes. It might even be true that most people write the vertical line first (stroke #6) because they think it’s the correct stroke order.

But if you’re a teacher, recording a TV show or YouTube video for perpetuity, claiming to be correcting other people’s kanji mistakes, you should check and re-check your lesson to avoid such embarrassment. This is akin to a French teacher not knowing whether “où” means “where” or “or” :man_facepalming:

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And I didn’t think you were implying any of that. What I was getting at was more of this:

Yeah, I guess, and it’s ironic, but what I’m trying to say is that mistakes or alternative stroke orders like this might not be uncommon or possibly even wrong. (馬 has four accepted stroke orders, if I’m not wrong.)

What I will say though, is that he probably should have checked standard stroke orders before doing that video, yes, if only for the sake of being formally correct. Especially since 服 is a common character without too many strokes.

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It’s may not be wrong if he were teaching cursive script. But this was a show for 3rd graders (小学3年).

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Ah, ok, in that case :joy: And honestly I get this sense Japanese stroke order doesn’t change for semi-cursive, so… yeah.

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He seems to be a popular educator in Japan (passed away in 2006). Here he’s teaching multiplication of two-digit numbers

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