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I learned Chinese, for all intents and purposes, as an ABC living in the west. I was taught the traditional way with a brush and calligraphy. In this method,

I learned Chinese, for all intents and purposes, as an ABC living in the west. I was taught the traditional way with a brush and calligraphy. In this method, I would agree stroke order and direction is very important. With a physical brush, the initial plot creates a wider line than when the stroke ends. Today, though, we use pencils and ballpoint pens. That initial thickness isn't reproduced. Why dose direction matter at that point? Most of the time you can't tell which direction I started my stroke. So while I think the parent response raises a good point that stroke order and direction may have been important in the development of the culture, I agree with you that it's less important these days.

jhanschoo 6y ago
I agree with your broad point that stroke order need not be dogmatic to good writing, since if you look at Chinese calligraphy, it's also clear that stroke order is not set in stone. Nevertheless, I think it would interest you that you can achieve very expressive line variation with even pencil and ballpoint; the trick is to write on a stack of paper so you can vary the area of contact between tip and paper: e.g. see https://www.bilibili.com/video/av21114247/ https://www.bilibili.com/video/av21114247/
Grustaf 6y ago
You can definitely tell stroke direction from a ballpoint pen, especially for short strokes and hooks, that often end with a very soft part. But in any case, stroke order is very easy to learn. You’ll pick up a few basic principles like top first then bottom, left first the right, plus the stroke order for common parts like boxes, without effort. That takes you 90% of the way, remembering the few exceptions is easy too. For me as a learner I never saw it as a burden at all.