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>But did you learn kanji without adhering to any particular stroke order? Yes, I learned almost entirely without learning the stroke order. I learned some basi

>But did you learn kanji without adhering to any particular stroke order? Yes, I learned almost entirely without learning the stroke order. I learned some basic stroke order rules which can be generally applied to many kanji/radicals and be correct enough 80% of the time. In total I spent maybe two hours on stroke order. For the record, I can hardly hand-write Japanese in the first place, maybe only 200 kanji at most. It's not necessary, however, to hand-write Japanese these days. I can read a couple thousand Kanji, however. I had no problem memorizing them without a hand-written component.

Grustaf 6y ago
80% is quite a lot. And my point was never that stroke order was hard to learn, i find it very natural moat of the time. Like you say, some basic principles cover almost all cases. Like spelling in languages like Spanish. What I’m arguing is that if you had no idea about stroke order, it would be very hard to remember how to write them at all. It would just be a meaningless heap of squiggles. And sure you don’t have to be able to hand write these days, but for me that is one of the joys.
- ddevault 6y ago
  >What I’m arguing is that if you had no idea about stroke order, it would be very hard to remember how to write them at all. Yes, but it's crucially not necessary for reading them. Writing literacy in Japanese is not a common skill even among native speakers and isn't really a requirement for modern fluency given that you can use a computer to do the remembering for you.
- livueta 6y ago
  I think it comes down to what you're optimizing for, but disagree that stroke order is essential for learning to read. Like ddevault, I learned the jouyou kanji and some extras almost entirely without stroke order. I've never even tried to handwrite most of the kanji I know because I almost exclusively care about being able to read printed text, especially in contexts where tooling isn't available (image-format scans of paper things, inside old games, etc). This is obviously anecdotal, but not having ever written most of the kanji/radicals I know didn't seem to hurt me much outside of having terrible handwriting (in the handful of occasions I ever have to handwrite in Japanese, the fact that I'm doing it at all seems to override nitpicks) and sometimes struggling to read sloppy/highly stylized handwriting (which is a valid issue). If you enjoy handwriting/learning for learning's sake more power to you, but learning stroke order isn't necessarily an integral part of learning kanji if you don't mind the tradeoffs involved.

Grustaf 6y ago

80% is quite a lot. And my point was never that stroke order was hard to learn, i find it very natural moat of the time. Like you say, some basic principles cover almost all cases. Like spelling in languages like Spanish. What I’m arguing is that if you had no idea about stroke order, it would be very hard to remember how to write them at all. It would just be a meaningless heap of squiggles. And sure you don’t have to be able to hand write these days, but for me that is one of the joys.

ddevault 6y ago
>What I’m arguing is that if you had no idea about stroke order, it would be very hard to remember how to write them at all. Yes, but it's crucially not necessary for reading them. Writing literacy in Japanese is not a common skill even among native speakers and isn't really a requirement for modern fluency given that you can use a computer to do the remembering for you.
livueta 6y ago
I think it comes down to what you're optimizing for, but disagree that stroke order is essential for learning to read. Like ddevault, I learned the jouyou kanji and some extras almost entirely without stroke order. I've never even tried to handwrite most of the kanji I know because I almost exclusively care about being able to read printed text, especially in contexts where tooling isn't available (image-format scans of paper things, inside old games, etc). This is obviously anecdotal, but not having ever written most of the kanji/radicals I know didn't seem to hurt me much outside of having terrible handwriting (in the handful of occasions I ever have to handwrite in Japanese, the fact that I'm doing it at all seems to override nitpicks) and sometimes struggling to read sloppy/highly stylized handwriting (which is a valid issue). If you enjoy handwriting/learning for learning's sake more power to you, but learning stroke order isn't necessarily an integral part of learning kanji if you don't mind the tradeoffs involved.