3 ms·
Stroke 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 min
by Grustaf 6y ago
Stroke 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.