children have penmanship work in the earlier years of learning the chinese language but that stops within a few years. what about all the characters that they p

children have penmanship work in the earlier years of learning the chinese language but that stops within a few years. what about all the characters that they pick up after penmanship work ends? there is some intuition to the stroke order that guides the writing of more elaborate characters, that is maybe picked up in the formative years. and the intuition seems extremely consistent among users of the language. i have not met anyone who did not learn the chinese language without doing penmanship work, and so i cannot say what it means to ignore the stroke order when writing chinese. if one were to pick up the latin alphabet with an unusual stroke order and were to carry that habit to adulthood, will we find his handwriting difficult to read? if he managed to train his hands to write with a most unusual method will he still write perfectly legibly, and can we even distinguish his stroke order if we were to inspect it carefully? i don't know the answer to this. out of curiousity i wrote the alphabet with a totally unfamiliar stroke order (e.g. starting the y's and g's from the bottom) and it looked as if i wrote it with my off hand - unsteady and unpracticed - which seems to suggest that maybe with some effort it could look totally similar. i can believe that without stroke order guidance one could still achieve legible chinese writing.