Consider the following characters, 牛 and 生. I know both are not exactly
identical for sure.

According to the textbook I am using, the stroke orders are given as follows:

![enter image description here](https://i.stack.imgur.com/Mxcwi.png)

My question is why the third and fourth steps are different?
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2014-01-04T21:09:03.313
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question
kanji stroke-order
Why are the common strokes of these two characters written in different order?
I can only speculate, but Japanese (and Chinese which it is copied from) was
traditionally written from top to bottom, so many characters are "optimized"
for writing in this direction. Both `|` and `_` are fine to end a character in
the bottom, so the next one can be started without too much moving. That
explains why character in left column is ended with `|`.

As for the character in the right, it feels smoother (try it with hand,
imagine to have a brush in it) to write it as presented - you do not need to
go up too much (if it was written as the left one, you would need to get up
longer after the middle `-`).

But it is just a sort of 'reverse engineering' from the fact of the top-down
writing direction. Maybe kanji stroke order has some more complicated and more
formalized rules.
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2014-01-04T21:26:47.047
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2014-01-06T07:56:38.643
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If you compare these two links:

<http://www.vividict.com/WordInfo.aspx?id=2831> for 牛 and
<http://www.vividict.com/WordInfo.aspx?id=2512> for 生

you can see how these characters have evolved over time.

Basically, 牛 starts as the image of the face of a water cow with its horns. so
the down stroke came last. Conversely, the life image emerged from 屮 and 土 at
one point during its evolution so you write the parts that come from the top
half first which means you wind up doing the down stroke as stroke 3 and then
two horizontal strokes after that.

Sometimes these historical artifacts of how to write it are better preserved
in Japanese than Chinese (esp. compared to mainland China).
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2014-01-04T23:51:51.813
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There are many such exceptions. A nice example occurs already with the first-
grade kanjis for "left" and "right".

![migi](https://i.stack.imgur.com/03TSZ.png)
![hidari](https://i.stack.imgur.com/olPOL.png)

Here it makes some sense, because you write the first two strokes of "left"
from the right to the left, while you write the first two strokes of "right"
from left to right, even though they look exactly the same. See also
<http://www.sljfaq.org/afaq/stroke-order.html> for further examples. I don't
know if it is possible (or helpful) to find an explanation for each exception.
Btw, does somebody know which authority determines the "correct" stroke order?
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2014-01-05T13:46:05.160
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answer