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Two 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 fo

Two 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 ago
1) 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 ago
There 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.
pier25 6y ago
> 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? I've always wondered why different cultures have different relationships with rules and organization. I'm from Europe but spent my teenage years in Northern Africa and have been living in Mexico for over a decade. I think about this all the time. My totally unscientific hypothesis is that it's all about the climate and geographical regions. For example, northern European countries tend to be a lot more organized than tropical countries. In Northern Europe one wouldn't survive next winter without organization, while in tropical countries there is food all year round. As for Japan I always thought that this almost obsession with order, details, and rituals comes from their lack of space for agriculture. Japan has few plains and lots of mountains so by necessity they had to learn to cultivate in difficult spaces to survive. This attention to detail is everywhere in their culture compared to, say, Latin America or Africa. In Mexico particularly there is almost an aversion to rules and imposed restrictions which in turn creates all sort of weird behaviors. A Mexican friend always argues this is in fact a perduring trauma from the Spanish conquest, but I argue that this doesn't happen in other countries.

Grustaf 6y ago

1) 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 ago

There 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.

pier25 6y ago

> 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? I've always wondered why different cultures have different relationships with rules and organization. I'm from Europe but spent my teenage years in Northern Africa and have been living in Mexico for over a decade. I think about this all the time. My totally unscientific hypothesis is that it's all about the climate and geographical regions. For example, northern European countries tend to be a lot more organized than tropical countries. In Northern Europe one wouldn't survive next winter without organization, while in tropical countries there is food all year round. As for Japan I always thought that this almost obsession with order, details, and rituals comes from their lack of space for agriculture. Japan has few plains and lots of mountains so by necessity they had to learn to cultivate in difficult spaces to survive. This attention to detail is everywhere in their culture compared to, say, Latin America or Africa. In Mexico particularly there is almost an aversion to rules and imposed restrictions which in turn creates all sort of weird behaviors. A Mexican friend always argues this is in fact a perduring trauma from the Spanish conquest, but I argue that this doesn't happen in other countries.