Do native speakers of Japanese write romaji the same way native speakers of
English would, or do they do it differently, possibly using the rules that
they'd use for writing hiragana, katakana, and kanji?
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2016-05-01T01:57:59.233
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question
rōmaji stroke-order
Is the stroke order native Japanese speakers use for romaji different to those of native English speakers?
This page shows an example of typical "proper stroke order of alphabets" which
Japanese students may see in basic English textbooks:

[アルファベットの一般的な筆順](https://www.nintendo.co.jp/ds/angj/qanda/write.html)

See the stroke order of A, M and W, for instance. Do you think writing M with
four strokes is odd? According to [this
question](http://oshiete.goo.ne.jp/qa/224130.html), Japanese Ministry of
Education seems to have determined "the proper stroke order" that way long
time ago. Some people seems to believe that this stroke order was influenced
by the kanji writing system in which upward strokes occur rarely, but I don't
know if that's true.

In reality, however, the stroke order is not considered important even at
school, as long as Latin alphabets are concerned. Most people stop writing `M`
and `W` with four strokes very soon. This does not necessarily reflect how
people _usually_ write these alphabets in Japan.

I know very little about how alphabets are written by hand outside of Japan,
so I'd like to see answers from other people. As a starter, [this Wikipedia
article](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regional_handwriting_variation#The_Latin_writing_system)
summarizes regional handwriting variations of alphabets and numerals.
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2016-05-01T03:06:18.527
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When I was a child in first grade, I learned how to write an "M" / "W" with
four(4) strokes. A 6 year old child has problems with eye-hand coordination to
get spacing correct on the "M" and "W".

Since traditionally the Japanese student did NOT learn how to write English
characters until 4th grade, I would assume the Ministry of Education in Japan,
just cookie cuttered some English learning program out of England, as a 9 year
old does have more control over strokes.
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2017-06-17T18:04:58.597
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Way back when as a French Canadian elementary school student, I don't remember
stroke order being given a great deal of emphasis beyond serving as a
convenient common ground when initially teaching how to write the letters,
first for block letters in first grade, and later for cursive letters in
fourth grade. After that, most people tended to develop their individual style
that included a mix of block and cursive letters, written in whatever order
was most comfortable for that person.

This contrasts strongly with the importance of correct stroke order in
Japanese, where it matters not only for kanji, but also for hiragana and
katakana. I suspect that this mentality was carried over to the roman alphabet
when it became important to teach it in Japan, and its influence still
continues: when Japanese kids start junior high school and English first
becomes a full-time part of the curriculum, they are made to learn roman
letters again, with the proper stroke order.

When I worked as a teacher at a cram school, it would trip me up at times
because the official stroke order doesn't always match the way I got into the
habit of writing the various letters when I was still in school.

The way Japanese people write the letters of the roman alphabet, then, will
match that of a subset of native speakers of other languages using that
alphabet, but I think you'd be hard pressed to find a common stroke order for
every single letter among a large majority of those native speakers.
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