93856
This got me confused:

Various kanji learning sites on the Internet and even books on kanji stress
the importance of stroke order while learning new kanji, saying it's highly
essential to learn to write kanji correctly. Yet the same sources say that the
act of writing kanji is slowly getting obsolete and one shouldn't worry too
much about writing the kanji while learning them;knowing the readings and
recognising them are more important.

Aren't these two statements kind of contradictory; stressing that learn stroke
order while learning kanji, and also saying knowing to write them is not
something to be worried when learning them?
CC BY-SA 4.0
2022-03-25T13:09:48.787
93839
2022-03-27T02:53:27.750
50886
question
usage culture jōyō-kanji
Importance of stroke order and writing kanji
In my experience living in Japan, stroke order has only been important when it
came to online dictionaries that let you search by 'stroke' - so, if you don't
know what a word means - you can look it up by stroke order.

I also heard many Japanese people forget _some_ kanji because they rely on
electronic devices when answering things, and my teacher once told me that
people can sometimes tell if you write kanji in the wrong order.

I haven't actually practiced writing Kanji in a long time, however, as I think
pursuing speaking/reading fluency trumps writing fluency at the moment. But in
the end, you do want to write properly if people can tell you wrote something
wrong.
CC BY-SA 4.0
2022-03-25T14:11:43.187
93843
2022-03-25T14:11:43.187
42117
93839
answer
Well, it's same for Japanese children. For some reason when we start learning
the basic, easy kanji, teachers stress the right stroke order; but when you
start learning more difficult kanji they care less. Honestly, stroke order
isn't that important unless you are learning _shodo_ (書道) as people can tell
if it's written in the right stroke order or not, or taking the Kanji Aptitude
Test (漢字検定).
CC BY-SA 4.0
2022-03-25T14:14:49.753
93844
2022-03-25T14:46:04.190
2022-03-25T14:46:04.190
3097
50916
93839
answer
The stroke order matters mostly in relation to handwriting. Although writing
may be not the most prevalent way over typing nowadays, recent rise of touch
devices allows people to easily input characters by handwriting again. It lets
you look up kanji you don't know whose reading; and to my experience, those
recognition engines are trained with people's normal stroke order, while would
be less accurate when written in untypical order.

The importance of stroke order in the discussion of handwriting is more like
that of the common sense. People may say the order is not that strict (and
it's not always unique actually), but for example you don't write capital A
from its horizontal bar. Since the previously written strokes rein in the
layout of following strokes, character produced in unusual order may look
unnatural aside from good or bad. Thankfully [learning the stroke order is
rule-based](https://www.tofugu.com/japanese/kanji-stroke-order/) rather than
memorizing the same number of definitions as kanji.
CC BY-SA 4.0
2022-03-26T11:28:35.423
93856
2022-03-26T11:28:35.423
7810
93839
answer
Since kanji shapes are heavily based on calligraphy, the stroke order and the
subtle nuances of strokes (like _hane_ , _harai_ ) are generally considered
more important than the stroke order of Latin characters. All Japanese
children [learn calligraphy (書道) at elementary school](https://web-
japan.org/kidsweb/cool/13-08/index.html) for dozens of hours, and are taught
to pay attention to stroke order and stroke nuances even when they are writing
with a pencil or a ball-point pen. [Special
fonts](https://japanese.stackexchange.com/a/52583/5010) similar to calligraphy
are used in elementary school textbooks.

Not all Japanese adults can write beautiful kanji themselves, but basically
all adults can intuitively notice dirty kanji whose strokes are written in
random order with their endings pointing to random directions. You don't have
to worry about too many details, but I recommend you remember the correct
order of most common components including 田, 山, 見, 糸, 本 and so on.

Of course, if you do not plan to write handwritten Japanese at all, you can
put off learning those things and rely on computers. It depends on your
purpose of learning Japanese.
CC BY-SA 4.0
2022-03-27T02:53:27.750
93861
2022-03-27T02:53:27.750
5010
93839
answer