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Japanese rules for writing your ABCs are surprisingly strict
- q3k 6y agoThis is not strictly a Japanese thing. I've had similarly tough requirements on my handwriting in a french primary school, for instance. To the point where my work would be thrown out if I dared to write letters differently than what was ordered. I have heard similar stores from multiple other European countries.
- supportlocal4h 6y agoI had the same experience in the U.S.
- stx 6y agoI had similar requirements for writing in school in Texas. I went into a special class to help kids falling behind in reading skills and they focused a huge amount of time on the way I wrote my characters. Probably not that important in helping me read as well as other kids at the time but who knows. They also said I would never be able to attend college and I now have a BS and MS so ...
- pavlov 6y agoMy daughter went to a French school when she was six, and the teaching seemed to be rigorous about stroke order and direction in cursive handwriting. (Now she’s seven and in an American school where they don’t seem to care about practicing handwriting at all, or indeed any kind of repetition. Instead the focus seems to be on parsing complex and ambiguous written instructions.)
- watwut 6y ago> Instead the focus seems to be on parsing complex and ambiguous written instructions. I love how this almost sounds like a compliment, almost.
- Someone 6y agoThere used to be rules for the hand you write with, too. Left-handed writing was forbidden, and didn’t work well, anyways when using a dip pen that wasn’t specially designed for left-handed use. I think the Japanese obsession with stroke order has its roots in writing with brushes and slower-drying ink. If you use them, stroke order will affect what letters look like more than when using ballpoint pens.
- innocenat 6y agoNot really. Even with ball point, while for neat letter stroke order doesn't matter, for a messier (normal day-to-day) writing, stroke order absolutely matter. It can become illegible fast if you use wrong stroke order, because correct stroke order tend to create similar overall shape while the wrong order don't. Granted, you don't have to be exact with the stroke order, but general rule still need to be followed -- you can't just write it in reverse order and expect it to be easily readable.
- stevekemp 6y agoI know when my dad grew up, in Scotland, he'd get hit with a ruler if he was seen writing with his left-hand.. Happily the rules had relaxed by the time I had to write left-handed, and very messily with a fountain-pen!
- mikekchar 6y agoQuite a lot of Japanese people seem to recognise characters less by their shape and more by the stroke connections, in my experience. No matter what the tool used to write it, legibility really requires writing the characters in the correct order for the most part.
- paganel 6y agoAm Romanian, a similar thing happened to me ~30 years ago, when I was in my 2nd or 3rd grade, i.e. I was drawing the letter capital S and the number 3 in a non-standard way (“backwards”, to quote my then elementary teacher) and that was not ok.
- Swizec 6y agoHad similar experience in Slovenia in elementary/middle school. We learned upper case and lower case typing, then cursive. All with strict rules on how to write correctly. Then came high school and computers were now ubiquitous. We all switched to some bastardization of typed cursive. Kind of like writing a computer font with more ligatures. Looks like chicken scratch, is hard to read, works okay. Biggest thing we dropped were all the cursive characters that don’t look like their typed counterparts.
- bsza 6y agoHad similar experiences in Hungary. Cursive style enforced throughout grades 1-4, with a strictly defined stroke order for each letter. Even for numbers. The bottom stroke in 2 is crooked, as well as the top stroke in 7, and God forbid you leave out the line through the middle. Even when I was in high school, one of my classmates once lost points on a test because he wrote his name in all capitals but dared put a dot on the letter i.
- desmondw 6y agoI was also taught in a similarly pedantic manner in the Midwest. Although if I was ever marked off for it I'm sure it wasn't to the extent of Japanese perfectionism.
- Mediterraneo10 6y agoI wonder if this is a problem in India too. I have seen multiple Sanskrit textbooks insist on writing devanagari with the right stroke order, and the right direction left–right or vice versa, even though with a modern ballpoint pen the final result will look the same anyway. Does that same pedanticism carry over into teaching of the modern languages like Hindi?
- mandarg 6y agoHaving learned multiple Devanagari languages at school (including both Sanskrit and Hindi), I don't recall being explicitly taught stroke order as such. There's an intuitive way to write most Devanagari characters that usually corresponds to the "preferred" order you mention, which is only apparent in serif Devanagari fonts anyway. But for example, I have no idea what the preferred order is for U+0918 घ, and never learned one as such. Side note: since you mentioned ballpoint pens, (at least 10+ years ago, things might be different now) we weren't allowed to use a standard ballpoint pen/biro; fountain pens were preferred and micro-point ink or gel pens were allowed.
- Baeocystin 6y agoI learned handwriting under the tutelage of a very stern French teacher. She seemed to genuinely enjoy inflicting The Ruler™ on that back of even a slightly exuberant student's knuckles. It was not a fun experience, although I do think that barred 7's make for better legibility, so it wasn't all for naught!
- huhtenberg 6y agoBah. We were monitored for correctly pointing the back of a pen directly into our right shoulder joint. If it didn't point there, you didn't do it right. Luckily, we also had a guy who was a lefty, so that was a blasphemy of a much higher order and let most of us, the incorrect pen holders, fly well under the radar.
- C19is20 6y agoItaly: my 15yo kid has such atrocious writing, I'm embarrassed to even call it chicken scrawl. How the teachers decode eg any of 47 ways of scratching the letter 'a', or indeed any others, i have no idea. I've been complaining about it since the kid was 5, and just silently seething for the last 5 years. Other battles to fight.
- ver_ture 6y agoThey're surprisingly silly. English developed completely separately from Japanese/Asia, so this teacher is pulling line-directions and rules out of her ass. There are no such conventions for the alphabet. Her poor students and their hand cramps, out there writing in courier.
- bradly 6y agoStroke order is an important part of writing in Japanese culture, with conventions. They aren't random. It is reasonable to a come up with a similar stroke ordering system for learning other languages in Japan. Calling them silly and pulled out of her ass is dismissive to the Japanese culture, the teacher, or the students.
- ver_ture 6y agoCreating this Japanese overlay of rules for English writing is disingenuous. The students might be in for a minor shellshock outside of her class. I respect the conventions they have for writing in Japanese, it's perfectly tailored to using a brush. The teacher should respect English conventions, the free-form, the cursive, either one.
- bradly 6y ago> it's perfectly tailored to using a brush. It isn't just using a brush; even with a pen and paper simple hiragana is easier when using proper stroke order. > The teacher should respect English conventions The teacher is following Japanese culture conventions to teach people of the Japanese culture a different language. People unfamiliar with the culture or the teacher should respect that.
- kps 6y agoThe Latin alphabet does have historical developmental stroke directions, not by rules but by what's natural and possible using the historical Euro writing tool — a broad-cut reed or quill pen. In this sense the Japanese stroke order for Latin letters is wrong; you can't push a reed pen to write an ‘O’ that way.
- boomboomsubban 6y agoAs an American, I definitely remember being taught these rules in elementary school and then just never having a teacher care beyond maybe one test. Which seems to be how the Japanese English teacher is also handling things.
- laurieg 6y agoAn interesting side effect of Japanese stroke order (at least with Japanese characters) is that character recognition for dictionary apps etc is based around stroke order. If you mess up the stroke order badly enough then it won't recognize the character at all.
- awirth 6y agoI've noticed this pattern too. For example, try to draw the character 口 on the 'draw' functionality on jisho.com -- the correct stroke order is (cardinal directions for 3 strokes): 1. NW -> SW 2. NW -> NE -> SE 3. SW -> SE. If you try to do it any other way it will fail. If this is a problem for you (e.g. learning Japanese and don't know stroke orders and/or don't care to learn them exactly) -- the Google Translate handwriting input for Japanese does not have this behavior (or at least as much) and will effectively recognize your incredibly shittily reproduced kanji.
- numpad0 6y agoMaybe those old dictionary software hold kanji as graphs internally and search as hierarchical trees. That would be far faster and more accurate than comparing 酒 酉 西 out of bitmaps as long as the user knows the order...
- thehappypm 6y ago╷ ┌ ┌┐ 口
- philsnow 6y agothe second stroke of 口 goes right from your first glyph ╷ to the third glyph ┌┐ said another way, your second glyph ┌ doesn't appear in the "correct stroke order" because the top+right sides of the 'mouth' are drawn in one stroke.
- masklinn 6y agoI expect their list is for ordering, not individual stroke. If you only put ╷ and ┌┐ you could get to the second by starting at the bottom right. The alternative would be to list individual strokes e.g. ╷, ┐, ─. Or to use bolding but it's really hard for me to notice that┍┓is BOX DRAWINGS DOWN LIGHT AND RIGHT HEAVY followed by BOX DRAWINGS HEAVY DOWN AND LEFT. Plus it still doesn't really specify stroke order.
- hart_russell 6y agoTeaching children unnecessary rote memorization over creativity... Gotta start them early
- eej71 6y agoIt's too bad that memorization - as a tool - is so readily dismissed. I think it is immensely valuable and enables one to master complex material and establish insights that would not be readily available through other means. I think its a false alternative to see it as memorization vs. creativity. I'd make the case that memorization provides a useful foundation for creativity. It enables one to command a large set of facts to then integrate them into new insights.
- Grustaf 6y agoDefinitely. The most creative artists, musicians, acrobats etc are not the ones that skipped learning the basics. Only when you mastered the basics very very thoroughly can you start being creative and innovative.
- watwut 6y agoBut, art fundamentals are not learned through rote repetition. There is a lot of practice, but it is supposed to be mindfull instead of rote and also is coupled with a lot of explanations of how things work and a lot of creative work. The usual drawing advice is complete opposite of what you suggest. Playing instrument in classical school is learned through repetition, but this schooling is not producing composers nor people able to create new music nor improvise. It makes people able to perform increasingly difficult technical pieces someone else made. That is completely different goal and schooling. Likewise, acrobats are not choreographs which is something completely different. Acrobacy does not lead to that.
- Grustaf 6y agoDo you have any examples of brilliant innovative musicians that did not master the basics very thoroughly? I don’t believe the commonly repeated idea that rote learning and repetition would somehow inhibit innovation. I’m quite sure it’s the opposite. Take Rodney Mullen, by far the most innovative skater ever, he practically created new school skateboarding. He’s a machine, completely mastered old school and is extremely consistent.
- otras 6y agoAlong the lines of correct stroke ordering, I learned from a colleague that studied a large amount of Japanese that they had used a visual dictionary for translating Kanji to English that both allowed you to draw the symbols and required the symbols to be drawn in the correct order. It seems similar to the base requirement for looking up how to spell a word in the dictionary; you have to have some idea of how the word is formed before you can find the full answer.
- wccrawford 6y agoFor Japanese characters, stroke order definitely affects how easy it is to draw a correct-looking character, so it makes sense to be picky about it. But for English, it simply doesn't matter as much. It's not like they use the same kind of drawing input to look up words in an English dictionary, either.
- dfox 6y agoMany “draw a character” input methods actually don't care at all how the resulting character looks and only use the order and direction of the strokes to generate set of matching characters. Similar idea is IIRC also used to order and collate characters in paper dictionaries.
- delfinom 6y agoEh, depends on your school? In NYC, I went to a public school where they were pretty strict and repetitive with teaching basic writing down to the stroke direction...
- sinkasapa 6y agoI had penmanship in elementary school. Lot's of boring repetitions filling class time, cursive as well. We all forgot about it later on like some mild trauma that we collectively buried. I actually remember feeling surprised when I didn't have to use cursive in college. I'm not saying that all the emphasis on nitpicks was ever good and I'm definitely not shedding any tears but there are definite signs that we're losing knowledge of the handwritten tradition. See this humorous Language Log post as an example: https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=3489 https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=3489
- microcolonel 6y agoJapan's weird anal-retentive method of primary and secondary education is hostile to language learning; it's bad enough here in Canada, where the typical anglo school will just as likely turn students away from the French language† as help them learn it, but Japan (among others) is on another level. We know, empirically, that this is not the way that people acquire language; but somehow it is the core of almost every public education body's language curriculum. † Do you know anyone who acquired French fluency by completing conjugation tables two hours a week for a decade?
- Grustaf 6y agoNo it’s not, it makes perfect sense for Chinese based scripts. And it works, look at their literacy rate.
- SpicyLemonZest 6y agoAll developed countries have literacy rates statistically indistinguishable from 100%, so I'm not sure it provides much evidence either way on the effectiveness of teaching styles.
- microcolonel 6y agoStroke order makes sense for 漢字, and to some extent for 仮名, but rigid calligraphy of this sort is not a necessity with English, it is a pure luxury, especially in this case, when it's just printing. That print lowercase a is not self-evidently “correct” in any sense, there is no history or reason behind printing an a that way, and you can make an argument that it causes unnecessary confusion with d to do so. Also, precise stroke order isn't really that important for 漢字 either. Which of these has correct stroke order? https://qui.suis.je/drop/20200608_0001.webp https://qui.suis.je/drop/20200608_0001.webp
- Grustaf 6y agoI’m not sure what you mean. Clearly the current forms of the lowercase letters are correct, what do you mean? Do you simply mean that they _could have_ looked differently? Sure. I can’t open the link, but yes, stroke order makes a big practical difference for learning, and of course for cursive.
- prvc 6y agoI believe similarly strict rules were observed for cursive writing when it was still being taught. I wonder whether such interminable busy-work is an emergent feature of educational institutions arising naturally as a result of how they are structured.
- mc32 6y agoNo I think in Japan they do it just to keep consistency with stroke order requirements for their other writing systems. They don’t want exceptions.
- ghaff 6y agoBefore most people typed, having at least reasonable handwriting was arguably a fairly useful skill. (Arguably, learning shorthand would probably have been equally useful for many but "clerical skills" were looked down upon in a lot of curricula.) That said, handwriting (Palmer script) was consistently my worst grade in elementary school and it's basically non-existent today.
- ddevault 6y agoThe article briefly mentions the reason for this: Kanji. English has 26 letters which are all fairly distinct from each other even when written by a chicken on LSD. Japanese has on the order of ~2,000 characters you need to know just to graduate high school, plus thousands more to read newspapers and advanced literature, and more still for names, places, and so on. Memorizing the stroke order isn't as important as some instructors make it out to be, but it can matter when trying to decipher hand-written Japanese and serves as an additional clue as to which maybe 10 ambiguous possiblities the writer was going for in a particular character. Extending it to English seems kind of silly to us, but if the students are already taught about stroke order, and use it as a tool for memorization in their native language, it makes some sense to apply the concept to English.
- Grustaf 6y agoSorry to disagree with you, but I’m not sure it’s even possible to learn Japanese or Chinese characters without adhering to a strict stroke order. Not necessarily the one they use (although after 2000+ years of teaching you might suspect it’s pretty optimal) but you can’t teach your hand to memorise the movement if there’s no particular order. And since there are so many common elements between characters, you can’t really choose stroke orders for each of them individually either.
- ddevault 6y agoI'm fluent in Japanese and I stand by what I said: "Memorizing the stroke order isn't as important as some instructors make it out to be, but it can matter [in some cases]." Also keep in mind that even native Japanese speakers struggle with Kanji, and more so with every passing year. Some of my Japanese friends with college educations struggle to even read some jouyou kanji, let alone write. With the aid of technology, modern Japanese fluency de-emphasizes the need for stroke order substantially.
- Grustaf 6y agoBut did you learn kanji without adhering to any particular stroke order? I taught myself around 1000 characters and I found it impossible to learn to read them without learning to write them, which in turn relied on muscle memory. I’m pretty sure muscle memory plays a very important role for most learners. I know that many young Japanese people rely on smartphones and other tech to avoid really learning kanji, but if anything that strengthens my point. It’s hard to learn to write them just by reading them, unlike English spelling for example.
- werdnapk 6y agoA lot of people notice my "incorrect" writing style if they watch me (even for a moment). I start my O's from the bottom and go clockwise for example, among other differences for many other letters. I was definitely taught how I should be doing it, but my brain just wanted to do it a different way. I got some bad marks on some writing tests, but once that part of school was over, I was left alone for the most part.
- Grustaf 6y agoStroke order is the only reason cursive Japanese/Chinese can even exist, your cursive would look nothing like mine if we used different stroke orders. Never mind the nightmare of teaching 100m (or a billion Chinese) to write thousands of pretty complex characters if there wasn’t a canonical way to do it. Also, it makes sense semantically. Most characters consist of several “subcharacter” that also exist in their own right, so you definitely want to write them as units. It’s a fundamentally flawed comparison.
- krallja 6y agoThis article isn’t about writing kanji. It’s about writing the letters A, O, k, etc.
- hrktb 6y agoAs others posted, cursive is the same deal in most european countries. Anecdotally this is why I can’t read most adult cursive writing, as I bailed very early to “print” like handwriting. I have no notion of how the letters flow and it just looks like messed up coils to me.
- Grustaf 6y agoWell the idea is the same, but since a Latin letter only has 2 or 3 strokes, rather than 10, it’s a completely different story.
- toast0 6y agoA lot of the cursive forms are pretty similar to dragging the pen while writing in block letters, with exagerated loops and a slant. F's are weird though.
- jhanschoo 6y agoContrarily, there is no One True Stroke Order to write cursive Japanese or Chinese. See for example 亦 http://www.sfzd.cn/shufa6/7550d88277ef1dc2f2bb5f4c1bdf64018.jpg http://www.sfzd.cn/shufa6/7550d88277ef1dc2f2bb5f4c1bdf64018.... Some authors analyze it as the bottom 火 component to be written as four dots, while later authors increasingly analyze it in the form you see today, where the middle strokes are written first. Today, those who do not take up calligraphy recognize only the latter form and order. There is a general tendency for some strokes to be written before others, but nothing is set in stone.
- larkost 6y agoI took Japanese in college, and we were taught that this is because dictionaries are arranged by stroke. For Kanji characters there are tens of thousands of them, so "alphabetical" order is a meaningless concept, making stroke count and order the most meaningful ordering concept. But that then requires stroke order (and direction) something you have to be completely consistent about. This is a memory from a couple of decades ago, so I could be wrong.
- redthrow 6y ago> so "alphabetical" order is a meaningless concept Japanese does have its alphabetical order. It's called gojyuon-jyun (or aiueo-jyun) [1], and most commonly used dictionaries use this order [2]. [1] https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E4%BA%94%E5%8D%81%E9%9F%B3%E9%A0%86 https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E4%BA%94%E5%8D%81%E9%9F%B3%E9... [2] http://octoba.jp/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/jp.ne_.biglobe.shinmeikai.gp_240135.png http://octoba.jp/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/jp.ne_.biglobe.s...
- numpad0 6y agoOnly for hiragana/katakana though
- redthrow 6y ago? It's for all words, including words written in kanji.
- numpad0 6y agoParent comment is about kanji and you’re talking hiragana pronunciation. Words that may contain kanji that naturally has pronunciations are sorted by pronunciation, yes, but individual kanji never even had an inclusive list and thus no logically defined linear order existed/exist.
- redthrow 6y ago
- gp7 6y agoA nice example of Japanese stroke order mattering are two of the katakana, ツ and シ. The difference is that the former starts at the top left and the strokes move right, then down and across to the left. The latter starts at the top left and moves down, then up and across to the right. It can be hard to tell what one you are looking at in practice if you don't know this. I think cursive used to serve the same function, which I basically conjecture from the fact that older people tend to be significantly better at reading cursive than me.
- toyg 6y agoYour oldies are better at reading cursive because cursive used to be read and written much more than it is today. It was the fastest way to write, and people had to use it a lot. Typewriters first and computers later removed a massive amount of handwriting. Schools in some countries reacted by dropping cursive altogether, probably because they thought the effort to learn it was not worth it anymore.
- taeric 6y agoI've taken a dive into the world of shorthand. Another thing near killed by computers. Surprisingly fun to get into, though. (The ridiculous sexism in many of the books is cringe inducing...)
- myu701 6y agoI learned just the letter-forms (no shortcut / brief forms) from Teeline Fast, really helped me when taking sermon notes or wanting to write in my journals with a bit of obfuscation.
- th0ma5 6y agoI had heard it was mostly to reduce ink blotting?
- pvarangot 6y agoIt helps with that if done right, but you can also reduce ink blotting in block if you learn the right strokes. I've seen a lot of people write block with a cursive a for example, and I think that reduces blot.
- konart 6y agoYep, same here in Russia: https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn%3AANd9GcQmxq7CDylL7JUsDTFrWjjJhggRMpz-ELlSdb_g4zJmk8K56r0i&usqp=CAU https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn%3AANd9GcQmxq... https://ds03.infourok.ru/uploads/ex/07bc/000585fb-26570f7b/hello_html_465cb584.jpg https://ds03.infourok.ru/uploads/ex/07bc/000585fb-26570f7b/h... (wow I completely forgot how to write Ж the right way...)
- orthoxerox 6y agoExcept literally no one will care if you change the order of the strokes after you graduate from elementary.
- anthony_romeo 6y agoQuick question: When I dabbled in learning Russian some time ago, my materials stressed that handwriting in Russia is primarily cursive. Schools in America have deemphasized/removed cursive writing from their curriculum. Has Russia seen similar trends in education/usage of cursive writing?
- konart 6y agoNo, if you write in russian you write in cursive. Some people adapt their "style" to make it easier for them (for example using "т" instead of its cursive counterpart) but I can't imagine anyone writing (or leaching how to write) like this: "мама мыла раму". This would also have the whole healthcare system destroyed. Can you imaging a doctor putting down letters you can tell from each other?
- anthony_romeo 6y agoThanks!
- xxpor 6y agoOne thing to note is that Russian italics usually take the letter forms of Russian cursive. Some of these look completely different than the block letter (think Latin Q or Z vs their cursive counterparts), so you have to be able to read it for more than just handwriting. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_cursive#/media/File:Cyrillic_cursive.svg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_cursive#/media/File:Cy...
- supernova87a 6y agoTwo random thoughts (and coming from the point of view that I am a fan of some aspects of Japanese culture): 1) You start to wonder whether such training to follow stroke order, "staying within the lines", is a reflection or contribution even to the rules-following society that Japan is? 2) I am sure many have written about it before, but I have never dug into it -- why is it that when you see English rendered on a Japanese website, it's always in a Courier-era font that is instantly recognizable? (highly pixelated, wireframe looking font). Is it lack of interest in development of English fonts for Japanese audiences? Is there some deep incompatibility in the page / paragraph rendering "technology"? At the same time, Japanese / Chinese characters in Japanese websites do have the equivalent of people designing different fonts (stroke widths, curvatures, styles, etc) -- why is English special (and badly rendered)?
- Grustaf 6y ago1) Partly. But in this case it’s also for very practical reasons, it makes teaching and learning much simpler, and it makes cursive writing possible. It wouldn’t be without strict stroke order.
- cehrlich 6y agoThere are good reasons for this. It's not just Japanese - for example, anyone who has ever ordered cheap Chinese electronics from Amazon will be familiar with the terrible fonts/weird letter spacing they use in the English part of the manual. Most Japanese fonts include characters for the roman alphabet for the sake of compatibility, but they're usually 1. monospaced, as most Japanese fonts are monospaced and having bits of non-monospaced text in a block of monospaced text is a bad idea, and 2. very low effort, as they just exist for compatibility so that any English text that needs to be rendered in this font doesn't end up as gibberish. This wouldn't be an issue if people switched to a different font when they want to write something in English, but the reality is they often don't, and that's how you end up with these awful looking bits of English text. Most people just type things up with whatever the default font is in whatever app they're writing in, and in the case of Japanese and Chinese people writing bits of English, that's the ugly character set that exists for the sake of compatibility. It's certainly not an issue of not knowing any better - just like you can instinctively tell a beautifully rendered Kanji from an ugly computer font one, they can do the same for English. I have seen Japanese technical documents, restaurant menus, etc with beautiful typography for the English bits. It's just that for most cases it's not worth worrying about to the people making the things. Regarding your other question, there two good reasons for drawing Kanji with the correct stroke order. 1. It makes them much easier to remember. This is important when there's thousands of them. If you want to know a bit more about this, read the introduction to Heisig's "Remembering the Kanji". I learned 3000 of them in about 3-4 months, and primitives/stroke order were essential to achieving this. 2. when reading kanji that were written with a brush (or even writing them quickly with a pen), you can see from the lines which order the strokes were written in, and it helps enormously with deciphering peoples handwriting.
- ginko 6y agoI remember I was taught a quite rigid way to write the alphabet when I went to elementary school in Austria and the quality of my writing being part of the grade. (And don't get me started on cursive) Thankfully that was mostly over sometime around middle school (although I was still required to write in cursive). Side note: The A's in the first example both look wrong to me since you're supposed to write the first two lines in one go without raising the pen. Having a discontinuity in the top corner is IMO a worse stylistic error than the placement of the middle line.
- yutopia 6y agoA Japanese tweet/blog aiming to stir up outrage among the “concerned” Japanese public, being taken up by an English-language website for their latest “weird Japan” article. Being Japanese myself I can share countless horror stories about how English is taught here, but crap article is crap.
- bemmu 6y agoCan confirm that "weird Japan" is the usual variety of story on the blog, but I posted this one after seeing it elsewhere and this article seemed to sum it up well. In reality a teacher wouldn't dock you points for writing the alphabet in the wrong order? If so perhaps the post should be deleted.
- yutopia 6y agoKnowing the state of English education here I wouldn’t be entirely surprised if the story was true, especially seeing how the original blog post was written by a tutor in (rather rural) Fukui. I’ve never experienced anything like this myself, but some teachers truly are clueless. However it’s quite a bit of a stretch to call these “Japanese rules for writing your ABCs”. The tweet wouldn’t have gotten 15k likes and retweets if this was a widespread occurrence or the standard way people are taught English here. It’s shocking and outrageous, that’s what made it viral.
- numpad0 6y agoyeah it's a RocketNews story... I wonder what would be the equivalent to RocketNews/Gigazine/itanew in English world, Sputnik US maybe?
- TulliusCicero 6y agoWhat's the problem? Every country has its quirks. You could write plenty of things about how the US is weird.
- Seb-C 6y agoThis is so true. When I learned to write (French) when I was a child, the teacher also gave us strict guidelines to the order and shape of the characters. I don't see any difference except that in my country, most people stop caring about it once the exam has passed. Japan is awesome when you really dive into the culture and language and try to understand it. If you don't, you'll probably have a hard time (hence the number of expats ranting about anything and everything, I guess). I always wondered why it is always the target for articles about "weird stuff". You can find weird people and concepts in any country if you search for it long enough...
- JoeAltmaier 6y agoMakes sense, in a culture where stroke order is paramount, that when writing other languages they would still consider it important. Heck, in Engineering drafting class we learned to letter in a very particular way. It took 4 strokes to letter a lower-case 'o' on a schematic.
- neves 6y agoI changed my calligraphy after I was an adult. I was inspired by this NYT OpEd: https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/interactive/2009/09/04/opinion/20090908_opart.html?em https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/interactive/2009... What impressed me was that there are more efficient ways to make your strokes. Some ways make your hand move less. Do You know any study about it?
- christiansakai 6y agoFun fact: The stroke order for the upper left symbol of Hidari (左) (meaning: left) and Migi (右) (meaning: right) is different. If you get the stroke order wrong you won't be accepted on the Kanji Proficiency Test (Kanji Kentei).
- norswap 6y agoMore info: in 左, you'd draw the horizontal line first, while in 右 the slanted vertical line goes first.
- vore 6y agoThat is super weird and looks like it's a Japanese-ism only: Chinese has no such difference: https://strokeorder.com.tw/%E5%8F%B3.html https://strokeorder.com.tw/%E5%8F%B3.html
- jumelles 6y agoThere are several cases where the Japanese and Chinese stroke orders are different for the exact same character.
- jhanschoo 6y agoNote that post you linked has different orders between the animation and the static image. If I'm not wrong, TW stroke order agrees with the JP order. CN standardized the stroke orders of many gylphs against calligraphic tradition. The TW stroke order in this case is more aligned with calligraphic tradition: see http://www.sfzd.cn/shufa6/2495714749c131513682e1a3f8e08fa62.jpg http://www.sfzd.cn/shufa6/2495714749c131513682e1a3f8e08fa62.... vs. http://www.sfzd.cn/shufa6/46625e0c6c9573d8b78056cc8919c64b6.jpg http://www.sfzd.cn/shufa6/46625e0c6c9573d8b78056cc8919c64b6.... where the calligraphic forms make the stroke order clear.
- norswap 6y agoIt's also weird for Japanese, typically the stroke order adheres to a certain logic, althought there are many exceptions (very roughly: top to bottom, left to right, trace a horizontal line before crossing it, do one stroke at a time, except for right angles angling downwards on the right).
- taeric 6y agoI recall similar rules learning to letter old school "drafting" documents. Pointedly, I remember getting spot checked on how many strokes and in what order a B was written. Granted, it serves even more purpose in Japanese. But I've always felt the fact was that writing is art, and great evidence that are can be taught in much more mechanical ways than most of us realize.
- tln 6y ago> English teacher Hitomi Igarashi shared what she has learned to be the “correct Japanese way to write the alphabet” on her blog back in 2018, and it might surprise you. Wish that blog was linked! (or I could find it) While I'm wishing, a "Japanese way" handwritten font would be cool.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- clogva1 6y agohttps://ameblo.jp/hitomi-nakahashi/entry-12376123961.html https://ameblo.jp/hitomi-nakahashi/entry-12376123961.html You'll have to click the translate button at the bottom. It covers more letters than the article, but not all.
- kube-system 6y agoHow do you teach children to form characters without being this specific? I remember being taught in a similar way here in the US. Here's one example: https://i.pinimg.com/originals/b7/71/9b/b7719b586e646f77c743dfd8e953c210.jpg https://i.pinimg.com/originals/b7/71/9b/b7719b586e646f77c743...
- TulliusCicero 6y agoI think when you're initially teaching how to write characters, yeah there's a stroke order, but people mostly just care about the writing being clear/legible/neat, not specific strokes being in order.
- kube-system 6y agoI agree, but most of the examples in the article aren't the same same strokes in different orders, but different strokes altogether.
- joyj2nd 6y agoLOL. I remember how it threw me off guard when I was asked by young Chinese students about stroke order for the Latin alphabet. It really puzzled me and I had to google to confirm that THERE IS NO STROKE ORDER for the Latin alpahbet. Yet, in Chinese (and Japanese I assume) there is. It is actually very very important. You actually won't be able to look up a character if you don't know with how many strokes to write it. It seems to be of no meaning for character recognition software, like Pleco.
- SAI_Peregrinus 6y agoIf I'm writing something that anyone other than I might need to read I tend to use single-stroke gothic technical lettering. That also has a strict stroke order, but it's very different from what the article describes. EG "O" is two strokes, one starting at the upper-left and curving counter-clockwise towards the lower right, the second starting at the upper-left and curving clockwise towards the lower right. Here[1] is a good reference to the capital letters. [1] https://designbuildacademy.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/Engineering-Lesson-3-Lettering-complete-explanation.pdf https://designbuildacademy.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/En...
- odomojuli 6y agoI'm second generation Japanese-American. I read the article. I learned both languages in USA. I just realized that I've been writing English my whole life with a stroke order.
- TulliusCicero 6y agoStrictly speaking, everyone has a stroke order. It's just that they may not be consciously aware of it, because it doesn't matter to them.
- robocat 6y agoStroke order is very important in English if you will learn cursive/script (joining your letters). The New Zealand curriculum in 2012 was[1]: Years 1&2 Learn letter formation. Years 3&4 Cursive writing via teaching ligatures – the joins to the letter. Years 5&6 Learning to join letters. Years 7&8 Joined up writing. Standard printed alphabets in New Zealand classrooms had small arrows and numbers to show stroke order, although maybe it isn’t taught any more? In the article they show how to draw a capital O, and option 1 is definitely correct (from top, counterclockwise), and the Japanese version (option 2) is simply wrong. Without the groundwork of drawing the letter strokes in the correct order, you cannot learn cursive easily (or it will just look wrong). An example is a lower case x, where it was taught as: top left semicircle to bottom left then top right semicircle to bottom right (with the two half circles touching in the middle). If the little x is taught to be formed this way, then one can easily learn to write the script x correctly and legibly. Edit: I painted a wall in my home with blackboard paint so friends can draw on it, and yesterday I was writing notes on it, and I immediately dropped into using cursive (even though I only occasionally write by hand now). I admit it wasn’t that readable (only just by me!) Disclaimer: I am middle aged and I went to a more conservative school - I have no idea of how many NZers can write cursive although most people older than me certainly do in my experience. [1] http://teachingnz.com/2017/07/22/should-schools-still-teach-handwriting/ http://teachingnz.com/2017/07/22/should-schools-still-teach-...
- kd5bjo 6y ago>An example is a lower case x, where it was taught as: top left semicircle to bottom left then top right semicircle to bottom right (with the two half circles touching in the middle). If the little x is taught to be formed this way, then one can easily learn to write the script x correctly and legibly. In the US, I was taught to form the lower-case x as two straight lines in block letters. When we got to cursive, the correct way was to draw a hump where the x should be, and come back at the end of the word to add the crossing stroke, like is done for t’s and i’s.
- galkk 6y agoomg, that gives me memories about technical drawing course at my alma mater (National Technical University of Ukraine), where we were required to draw everything by hand, including fonts: http://docs.cntd.ru/picture/get?id=P0057&doc_id=1200003503&size=small http://docs.cntd.ru/picture/get?id=P0057&doc_id=1200003503&s..., http://docs.cntd.ru/document/1200003503 http://docs.cntd.ru/document/1200003503, and were graded for the quality of it.
- lisper 6y agoPeople still build wagon wheels too: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCMgTlht-PsNniRIuaax4m8Q https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCMgTlht-PsNniRIuaax4m8Q Once upon a time it was a genuinely useful skill. Nowadays not so much.
- cannam 6y agoNot much here about how clear or appealing the results are, aesthetically. In that respect, I think the rules are quite successful. Many years ago, I made friends with a Japanese person while we were both rambling in New Zealand, and we wrote to each other on paper for a while afterward before switching to email. I liked her handwriting, and I imagined it had something to do with her personality - clear, perky, rounded, friendly. I still had this image in mind until, much more recently, I visited the Death Railway museum at Kanchanaburi in Thailand, and I looked at the exhibits of records written by the Japanese jailers in the death camps during the second world war - and they had the same handwriting! The friendly handwriting of my correspondent was also the friendly handwriting of the commanders sending prisoners to their deaths. It's a good script, and I learned something about not judging people by their handwriting. The goodness of my correspondent was real, but it wasn't manifest in her writing.
- gumby 6y agoI watched my son have an A/B test. His school was bilingual (German/English): English was taught by non-German teachers, in English only (starting in grade 1); some of the teachers couldn't even speak German (how does that work?). All the subjects except English require the kids to use fountain pens and of course use the German letterforms. The kids' handwriting was clear as a bell right from grade 1. In the beginning they had workbooks that also showed the stroke order. By contrast, although supposedly the same rules applied in English (foundation pens and German letterforms), in practice the English teachers didn't care what writing implement was used and paid no attention to handwriting whatsoever. As a result these same kids drew often illegible scrawls when writing English which they could otherwise speak, read, and type just fine. Fun trivia: The first graders learnt one letter of the alphabet each week; in English this was "A" the first week, "B" the second etc while in German it was frequency order (R, S, and E were among the first few IIRC)
- ianbicking 6y agoI'm guessing the English-speaking teachers came from a less formal background. In the U.S. while form isn't typically handled in a strict way, many materials include suggested strokes and while there isn't any "standard" instruction in the U.S., handwriting lessons are common, including details like proper grip. But the goal is only legible handwriting, not a particular form, and teachers will often emphasize that form changes over time and that different approaches are OK. How does German instruction handle left-handed kids?
- leipert 6y agoBilingual school hints towards a private school, so you might be right. German education is actually strict around who is teaching and even private schools have to follow a public curriculum. Lefties have special pens, as we generally learn writing with foundation pens which would smear for a leftie. Sometimes I remember lefties (and righties?) using blotting paper to prevent smears. In the 90s you still had some lefties being forced to write with their right hand. I assume they are now allowed to write with ball pens that don’t smear. All the lefties I know in my generation have an awkward writing position in order to prevent smears. But generally the way you write an „N“ doesn’t differ. You start on the left bottom -> up -> right bottom -> up.
- timwaagh 6y agoI definitely learned a 'one true way' to write alphabetic letters in primary school. In the Netherlands. We had to write every letter in one stroke in one specific way. Then we learned to write whole words in one stroke. I was pretty terrible at it and was glad to be allowed to use 'block letters'. I don't know whether that was universal across schools here or whether they still do.
- ummonk 6y agoWait is this for cursive or print characters?
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- stevula 6y agoI've recently started practicing calligraphy and, for each script, there is a prescribed stroke order (called a "ductus").
- shermanmccoy 6y agoSuch an ignorant article, with the usual undercurrent of sycophantic nippohphilia. I'm so tired of sycophants on the internet pointing at some Japanese cultural 'thing' they have observed, in this case from reading someone else's blog, and presenting it to the world as though it is some unique discovery from the treasure trove of wonderful Japanese eccentricities. This is not exclusive to Japan. Learning to write in also China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Korea, and Thailand to begin with, stroke order matters. They carry over the same instruction technique when they teach English.
- ISO-morphism 6y agoThere's a word for that! "Nihonjinron" [1] While the medium of internet blogposts and perceived sycophantic motivations may be more modern, this kind of "Japanese exceptionalism" has been common enough in writing to warrant its own genre. While nihonjinron does include works prior to the Meji Restoration, > The concept became popular after World War II, with books and articles aiming to analyze, explain, or explore peculiarities of Japanese culture and mentality, usually by comparison with those of Europe and the United States. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nihonjinron https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nihonjinron
- jhanschoo 6y agoI would note that to the extent that schools enforce a stroke order, these stroke orders are somewhat arbitrary, and concerns more with legibility, pedagogy, and, for some, enforcing it for the sake of enforcing it rather than an actual tradition. In the first place, even for identical characters, the way different Han-character writing countries have standardized their stroke order (to the extent that they have) may differ. Even with this, the stroke order may differ from the mainstream stroke order of the carefully-written Kaishu calligraphic style. And with more cursive calligraphic styles, the writers have more freedom to change the stroke order, choose alternative strokes, choose even alternative forms and traditions of the gylph (think straight r vs. r rotunda) for speed and expression; even, say, mainstream Xingshu (Running-script) regularly chooses a different stroke order and variant strokes from Kaishu. One sad result of this is that many writers of Han characters who do not then pursue calligraphy then believe that there is one correct way to write characters, and come to perpetuate and foist a baseless fiction upon others, and in some respects, judge others by it.
- apricot 6y agoStroke order is very important when writing kanji, for good reason: it helps memorize the characters and also makes them look well-balanced. Also, trying to read cursive Japanese or Chinese is a futile endeavor if you don't know the stroke order. So it's only natural the Japanese would impose a stroke order for latin letters as well. I got a 100% on the test by systematically choosing the way most dissimilar to how I would write each letter.
- fomine3 6y agoStroke order for radicals (部首) is important, but IMO precise stroke order isn't so important (example: how to write "口").
- uranusjr 6y ago口 is a radical, so your argument is DOA.
- apricot 6y agoSome characters have more than one stroke order, and some characters are commonly written in a wrong order. I remember a Japanese TV program asking people on the street to write 馬 (horse), and making fun of people writing it in the wrong order. I guess it would be like a reporter asking people to spell "definitely" or "embarrassment" -- you're bound to get lots of wrong answers. But I disagree on 口, it just doesn't look right when you don't use the correct stroke order. It shouldn't be a perfect square or rectangle any more than the letter O should be written as a ge○metrically perfect circle or ellipse.
- virtualritz 6y agoThere is a curious symmetry in that the average Westerner is just as ignorant about calligraphy as the average Japanese is ignorant about typography. In Japan this is reflected everywhere in choice and typesetting of Western fonts. Products, websites, newspapers, business cards. It is almost a monoculture in choice of fonts and completely devoid of any microtypography or typesetting rules unless helped by stuff built into software. The enforcememt of rules that essentially lock a student into a narrow and arbitrary ‘standard’ character set for their handwriting reflect the lack of understanding of the important role typography plays in Western communication and how your style of written letters is an expression of personality. This is regrettable as handwriting of Western type is probably the closest ‘intersection’ with the art of calligraphy that has deep roots in Japanese culture. As someone who studied typography and loves to do calligraphy doodles all the time and who helped digitize quite a few handwritings into fonts I’m saddened by this. But having lived & worked in Japan, certainly not surprised.
- pjc50 6y agoWestern handwriting used to be highly standardised; the style known as "copperplate" was taught in schools. To a certain extent joined-up writing forces a stroke order on you - the pen enters from the left, forms a continuous figure, and exits at the right to match up with the next character. Then you come back and cross the "t"s and dot the "i"s. It is significantly harder to do it in this style if you're left-handed. Other character sets and styles may be of interest: the classic "blackletter Gothic" (Fraktur, until banned by the Nazis) used for German. Cyrillic handwriting is also quite different from the normal standalone characters.
- crimsonalucard1 6y agoThis stuff all comes from China originally. I'm Chinese so I know. It's because Chinese characters use to be written with brushes and with brushes the stroke order of the lines is very important for legibility and beauty. See the pictures in the link, you'll understand: https://www.google.com/search?q=chinese+calligraphy&rlz=1C5CHFA_enUS853US861&sxsrf=ALeKk01o4JfJypS26y5fXiwNiWbv7c7hUQ:1591677103390&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjvzuCi8_PpAhWTsp4KHc8cAyEQ_AUoAXoECBgQAw&biw=840&bih=906 https://www.google.com/search?q=chinese+calligraphy&rlz=1C5C... Just imagine what those characters will look like if you did strokes out of order... This stroke order carried over to pen and pencil and also to japan after they adopted Chinese characters as Kanji and invented their own unique scripts called hiragana and katakana. Even with a pencil, stroke order is still very important to Chinese characters, it's kind of like an accent in your writing. People can sense something is off with your writing if you wrote strokes out of order. It's still legible and can even be neat but people can sense something off with stroke order. Japanese people are just taking stroke order and applying it to English.
- nix23 6y agoAs a lefty, with all the respect, everything that's written there is completely wrong, in fact mirror wrong