In Japanese, is it acceptable to write kanji letters in the Chinese style? For
example, is it acceptable to write 田 with the 3rd and 4th strokes swapped, or
着 with the 6th and 7th strokes combined?
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2013-01-11T06:19:39.490
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kanji chinese stroke-order
Is it acceptable in Japanese to write kanji characters in the Chinese style?
I feel that at the extremes of stroke order perfection foreigners always seem
to be better than native Japanese, maybe because there are just too many who
make it a pastime to know all stroke orders for all sorts of obscure 漢字.
Unless you are dealing with a 書道 teacher (or school teacher), the general
focus is more on whether you are able to remember all strokes correctly, no
matter what order. Now 田 is a primary two 漢字 and an exception to one of the
first rules "if a horizontal line crosses a vertical line, the vertical line
is written first, by which it would be more sensible to write 冂 > 土 and not 冂
> ｜ > 二. But because it is the archetypal exception to stroke order, I would
say that all Japanese do remember 田, but a few might get caught up in 荘 or 我,
especially if you make them think about it. (The Japanese obviously will have
a better kinetic memory than you. You might enjoy [this
question](https://japanese.stackexchange.com/questions/7038/what-is-the-role-
of-%E7%A9%BA%E6%9B%B8-writing-kanji-in-the-air-in-modern-japanese) about 空書.)

Stroke order is one thing, but combining strokes is practical and the
foundation for most styles of 書道. Combining strokes is what must happen
naturally. (They are still conceptually 12 strokes in a particular order, even
if you didn't lift your pen/brush between stroke 6 and 7.)

In any case you are still wondering, regarding the reaction especially to the
first blunder, I think @ssb put it quite well in his comment.
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Yes, it is not that big a deal to get some ordering wrong. Most of the time,
unless someone is watcing you write, they won't even be able to tell how you
wrote it!

The reason the stroke order is emphasized in Japanese schools is that as you
start writing kanjis faster and faster, strokes start to join together. You
can see the most beautiful example of this in 行書, but you see some of this in
normal hand-writing people do. When you are writing such text, getting the
stroke order right becomes critical, as others won't be able to read it if the
order is diffrent. Similarly, to read such letters one needs to know the
proper order of strokes.

As a foreigner studying Japanese, you should be sticking to 楷書, with each
stroke cleanly separated. So long as you do that, don't worry too much about
the stroke order.
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2013-01-15T18:46:33.190
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Most of the Japanese text that is produced is produced by printing (books,
newspapers, magazines, office printing, electronic displays, ...) and in
printing there is no stroke order, or no evidence of stroke order in the end-
result.
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2013-01-16T01:37:35.807
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It depends.

In my Japanese language school, there were a few Chinese students, and my
teachers would emphasize before exams that Kanji have to be written using the
Japanese stroke order.

On the other hand, for the character 備 they insisted that stroke 7 starts
where stroke 4 ends and not where stroke 6 starts, even though in my
understanding, the former is the ("modern" traditional) Chinese stroke order,
whereas the latter is the Japanese stroke order (as well as the "traditional"
traditional Chinese stroke order). Compare [備 in the
wiktionary](http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E5%82%99) and [備 in the Kangxi (p.
113 character 21)](http://www.kangxizidian.com/kangxi/0113.gif).
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