> I took Japanese in college, and we were taught that this is because dictionaries are arranged by stroke. There's multiple methods of searching a modern Kanji

> I took Japanese in college, and we were taught that this is because dictionaries are arranged by stroke. There's multiple methods of searching a modern Kanji dictionary, but, yes, this is a useful property of stroke order. The bigger issue is when you have characters with 8+ strokes you quickly become reliant on specific shapes that come as artifacts to the stroke direction and order for proper identification, messing this up makes things a pain to read. You also cannot purely rely on an "alphabetical" sorting in a Kanji dictionary anyway, as every character may have two pronunciations and you need to be able to look it up without knowing either. Some do have indexes letting you look a character up if you already know the on-yomi or kun-yomi reading but not the other, though.