5 ms·

Stroke order is very important to Japanese culture, in a society where the process matters just as much as the end result. Some calligraphists take stroke order

by patio11 11y ago

Stroke order is very important to Japanese culture, in a society where the process matters just as much as the end result. Some calligraphists take stroke order very seriously, and will probably explode if they see someone writing a Kanji with incorrect stroke order. One might phrase this "Stroke order is assigned by convention in Japanese; deviating from the conventional order is incorrect, much laik hau Einglish speling iz nat ap four eendevizyuelle tyoise." ("What's the matter? You can sound it out. Pfft, Americans, such rigid traditionalists. It makes sense in the context of their religious views and conservative political tendencies, though." [+]) This avoids unfortunate Man Japanese People They're So Craaaaazy overtones. (FWIW: stroke order is prescriptionist not descriptionist but AFAIK prescriptionism has a virtually hegemonic mindshare among relevant authorities.) n.b. Otherwise this project and post is freaking excellent. [+] You can actually read Japanese-language takes on American culture which are exactly as bad as this Orientialism-in-reverse.

emmett 11y ago
I think a key point about this, which was only clear to me after I learned to write Hanzi in Mandarin, is that if you write the strokes in the wrong order it will not look right at the end. To someone looking at characters for the first time, it's not obvious that the stroke order matters to the reader as spelling does in English. It's not about fetishization of the process over stroke order, it's really obvious to the reader if you wrote the character incorrectly.
- schoen 11y ago
  I've kind of wondered about how you can tell -- do you know of an example that's online anywhere that makes it clear how it looks different? (... when written with a pen or pencil?)
  - yaowenjiaozi 11y ago
    The blog post's image on a child's struggle is kinda sorta one example. It shows the pencil at the last stroke of the bottom right character and that stroke order is wrong. Correct stroke order is shown here: https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E6%88%90 https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E6%88%90 To answer your question, if the image doesn't show the pencil positioned on that last stroke, I'd say that the characters don't look right and may infer but cannot tell for sure that they were written using incorrect stroke orders.
  - toufka 11y ago
    see: す - imagine if it were written from bottom to top. The placement of the 'straight' part of the vertical line and the placement of the 'curl' would be opposite (especially if you're using a brush instead of a pen). This is similar to the lowercase English 'a' or 'u' written bottom to top - especially if using cursive. or see: お the last 'dash' in the top right is a retouching of the paper after the curl on the bottom right. Imagine a swirl that starts in top middle, swings around on the bottom left, swings around on the bottom right, lifts off the paper, and then touches back down briefly in the top right. If you're hand-writing, that little landing dot can be huge, tiny, or even conjoined, but to be legible it's generally visually a continuation of the lower stroke. If you just copied the letter without any concept of stroke, it would be difficult to read because you'd be looking for that swirl. Imagine the dot on a lowercase 'i' - it's supposed to be directly above the stroke for your brain to render it as an 'i' vs an 'l'. It's why when written out you can distinguish 'il' and lt' even though they're quite similar if drawn literally, quickly. An example of stroke order vs stroke direction is more apparent when you need good proportions. Kanji like 風 or 看 are really hard to 'draw' with good square proportions if you don't stroke them in a particular order. Kind of like trying to draw a face by starting with the nostrils, then doing the eyebrows, and ending with the outline of the face - it's tough. Interestingly, the Japanese hiragana letters are really designed to be written with a brush from top to bottom. The letters flow from one to the next really nicely when written from top to bottom, and are actually much harder to write properly when written left to right. See: す - き - の. They're much more natural to write top to bottom, and keep going down rather than from a left to right (which is also indicated by stroke order - the horizontal bars on the letters above are written before the downstrokes).
    - timr 11y ago
      Ehhhh. This is all starting to sound rather speculative. People draw the lowercase 'a' in all sorts of different ways and end up with an equally valid result. There's no particular reason why drawing す from bottom-to-top would require that the shape be different. You just have to know the shape. I also don't buy Emmett's claim. There are regional differences in stroke order, even for hanzi. Japanese people use a different stroke order for kanji than mainland Chinese people use for hanzi, which again is different than the stroke order used by people in Taiwan and Hong Kong. The differences implied by these things are smaller than the differences in CJK fonts, which have no inherent "order" at all, yet people somehow manage to read. Stroke order matters for calligraphy and memorization and dictionaries, but as patio11 says, it's largely just prescriptive. Spelling is prescriptive, too: it's historically and/or conventionally derived, but knowing the rules makes learning words easier, and you certainly can't use a dictionary without it.
  - hardmaru 11y ago
    Maybe this can be another machine learning problem.
wodenokoto 11y ago
That was a joke. And there are several of them throughout the post. But anyway, I'll bite: stroke order is in no way comparable to your examples. It's comparable to whether you start "5" with the vertical or horizontal line, or an "8" at the top or the bottom.
- jpatokal 11y ago
  Funnily enough, I've been chewed out in Japan for writing my Latin numerals "wrong"! (Also, are there really people who start an 8 at the bottom...?)
  - dmd 11y ago
    ... are there people who start it not at the bottom!?
    - cgm616 11y ago
      I know people that draw two circles, one on top of the other.
    - cgm616 11y ago
      I know people that draw two circles, one on top of the other.
    - jpatokal 11y ago
      I start all my digits at the top, why would I make an exception for 8? http://jp2.r0tt.com/l_c1714080-82ad-11e1-9f79-1ff907600002.jpg http://jp2.r0tt.com/l_c1714080-82ad-11e1-9f79-1ff907600002.j... ...except that I draw bars for the 7's as taught in Finnish elementary school, which is clearly Wrong(tm) per the above instructions: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/7_(number)#Evolution_of_the_glyph https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/7_(number)#Evolution_of_the_gl...
      - michaelbuddy 11y ago
        8 is a special number - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9GOqM18Bhhg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9GOqM18Bhhg
ericjang 11y ago
Admittedly, there's real danger when a cultural majority uses "weirdness" as a value judgment on immigrants and foreigners. But... If hardmaru's remark about Japanese culture ("a society where the process matters just as much as the end result") is incorrect, I'd prefer to see that idea challenged for accuracy, rather than labeling it as "hegemonic". The remark about calligraphers exploding was a joke - even in Japan/China, there's the stereotype that calligraphers are fussy perfectionists. My grandfather was a calligrapher for the Taiwanese govt for many years and he'd probably explode too, if he saw any of my Chinese handwriting. Cultures are inherently different, and I think it's okay to point out oddities in one's culture or someone else's. hardmaru seems to have lived in Japan long enough to be credible on this matter, and I have no reason to suspect bad intentions.
- hardmaru 11y ago
  my grandfather would turn over in his grave if he saw my Chinese handwriting too :)
hardmaru 11y ago
maybe I went too far with the cultural jokes compared to typical papers written on machine learning- I meant no harm, hopefully I didn't offend too many! I love living in Japan, and everything about Japanese culture (even Japanese company culture..), sometimes I just poke a little fun at it..
spooningtamarin 11y ago
I can't sound it out. I'm used to a phonemic orthography.

by patio11 11y ago

emmett 11y ago

I think a key point about this, which was only clear to me after I learned to write Hanzi in Mandarin, is that if you write the strokes in the wrong order it will not look right at the end. To someone looking at characters for the first time, it's not obvious that the stroke order matters to the reader as spelling does in English. It's not about fetishization of the process over stroke order, it's really obvious to the reader if you wrote the character incorrectly.

schoen 11y ago
I've kind of wondered about how you can tell -- do you know of an example that's online anywhere that makes it clear how it looks different? (... when written with a pen or pencil?)
- yaowenjiaozi 11y ago
  The blog post's image on a child's struggle is kinda sorta one example. It shows the pencil at the last stroke of the bottom right character and that stroke order is wrong. Correct stroke order is shown here: https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E6%88%90 https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E6%88%90 To answer your question, if the image doesn't show the pencil positioned on that last stroke, I'd say that the characters don't look right and may infer but cannot tell for sure that they were written using incorrect stroke orders.
- toufka 11y ago
  see: す - imagine if it were written from bottom to top. The placement of the 'straight' part of the vertical line and the placement of the 'curl' would be opposite (especially if you're using a brush instead of a pen). This is similar to the lowercase English 'a' or 'u' written bottom to top - especially if using cursive. or see: お the last 'dash' in the top right is a retouching of the paper after the curl on the bottom right. Imagine a swirl that starts in top middle, swings around on the bottom left, swings around on the bottom right, lifts off the paper, and then touches back down briefly in the top right. If you're hand-writing, that little landing dot can be huge, tiny, or even conjoined, but to be legible it's generally visually a continuation of the lower stroke. If you just copied the letter without any concept of stroke, it would be difficult to read because you'd be looking for that swirl. Imagine the dot on a lowercase 'i' - it's supposed to be directly above the stroke for your brain to render it as an 'i' vs an 'l'. It's why when written out you can distinguish 'il' and lt' even though they're quite similar if drawn literally, quickly. An example of stroke order vs stroke direction is more apparent when you need good proportions. Kanji like 風 or 看 are really hard to 'draw' with good square proportions if you don't stroke them in a particular order. Kind of like trying to draw a face by starting with the nostrils, then doing the eyebrows, and ending with the outline of the face - it's tough. Interestingly, the Japanese hiragana letters are really designed to be written with a brush from top to bottom. The letters flow from one to the next really nicely when written from top to bottom, and are actually much harder to write properly when written left to right. See: す - き - の. They're much more natural to write top to bottom, and keep going down rather than from a left to right (which is also indicated by stroke order - the horizontal bars on the letters above are written before the downstrokes).
  - timr 11y ago
    Ehhhh. This is all starting to sound rather speculative. People draw the lowercase 'a' in all sorts of different ways and end up with an equally valid result. There's no particular reason why drawing す from bottom-to-top would require that the shape be different. You just have to know the shape. I also don't buy Emmett's claim. There are regional differences in stroke order, even for hanzi. Japanese people use a different stroke order for kanji than mainland Chinese people use for hanzi, which again is different than the stroke order used by people in Taiwan and Hong Kong. The differences implied by these things are smaller than the differences in CJK fonts, which have no inherent "order" at all, yet people somehow manage to read. Stroke order matters for calligraphy and memorization and dictionaries, but as patio11 says, it's largely just prescriptive. Spelling is prescriptive, too: it's historically and/or conventionally derived, but knowing the rules makes learning words easier, and you certainly can't use a dictionary without it.
- hardmaru 11y ago
  Maybe this can be another machine learning problem.

wodenokoto 11y ago

That was a joke. And there are several of them throughout the post. But anyway, I'll bite: stroke order is in no way comparable to your examples. It's comparable to whether you start "5" with the vertical or horizontal line, or an "8" at the top or the bottom.

jpatokal 11y ago
Funnily enough, I've been chewed out in Japan for writing my Latin numerals "wrong"! (Also, are there really people who start an 8 at the bottom...?)
- dmd 11y ago
  ... are there people who start it not at the bottom!?
  - cgm616 11y ago
    I know people that draw two circles, one on top of the other.
  - cgm616 11y ago
    I know people that draw two circles, one on top of the other.
  - jpatokal 11y ago
    I start all my digits at the top, why would I make an exception for 8? http://jp2.r0tt.com/l_c1714080-82ad-11e1-9f79-1ff907600002.jpg http://jp2.r0tt.com/l_c1714080-82ad-11e1-9f79-1ff907600002.j... ...except that I draw bars for the 7's as taught in Finnish elementary school, which is clearly Wrong(tm) per the above instructions: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/7_(number)#Evolution_of_the_glyph https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/7_(number)#Evolution_of_the_gl...
    - michaelbuddy 11y ago
      8 is a special number - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9GOqM18Bhhg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9GOqM18Bhhg

ericjang 11y ago

Admittedly, there's real danger when a cultural majority uses "weirdness" as a value judgment on immigrants and foreigners. But... If hardmaru's remark about Japanese culture ("a society where the process matters just as much as the end result") is incorrect, I'd prefer to see that idea challenged for accuracy, rather than labeling it as "hegemonic". The remark about calligraphers exploding was a joke - even in Japan/China, there's the stereotype that calligraphers are fussy perfectionists. My grandfather was a calligrapher for the Taiwanese govt for many years and he'd probably explode too, if he saw any of my Chinese handwriting. Cultures are inherently different, and I think it's okay to point out oddities in one's culture or someone else's. hardmaru seems to have lived in Japan long enough to be credible on this matter, and I have no reason to suspect bad intentions.

hardmaru 11y ago
my grandfather would turn over in his grave if he saw my Chinese handwriting too :)

hardmaru 11y ago

maybe I went too far with the cultural jokes compared to typical papers written on machine learning- I meant no harm, hopefully I didn't offend too many! I love living in Japan, and everything about Japanese culture (even Japanese company culture..), sometimes I just poke a little fun at it..

spooningtamarin 11y ago

I can't sound it out. I'm used to a phonemic orthography.