5 ms·

This 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 w

by q3k 6y ago

This 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 ago
I had the same experience in the U.S.
stx 6y ago
I 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 ago
My 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 ago
There 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 ago
  Not 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 ago
  I 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 ago
  Quite 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 ago
Am 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 ago
Had 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 ago
Had 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 ago
I 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 ago
I 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 ago
  Having 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 ago
I 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 ago
Bah. 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 ago
Italy: 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.

by q3k 6y ago

supportlocal4h 6y ago

I had the same experience in the U.S.

stx 6y ago

I 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 ago

My 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 ago

There 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 ago
Not 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 ago
I 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 ago
Quite 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 ago

Am 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 ago

Had 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 ago

Had 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 ago

I 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 ago

I 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 ago
Having 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 ago

I 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 ago

Bah. 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 ago

Italy: 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.