I think the reason many beginners feel that stroke order is not very important even though their teachers (including me) insist that it is, might be because they tend to think of Chinese characters as pictures rather than written symbols. If your native language doesn’t use the Latin alphabet, it probably has other rules that follow the same principles! Writing, not drawing Chinese characters are not pictures! In other words, other languages written with our alphabet have stroke order rules too, it’s just that you don’t think of them as such because you internalised them at a young age. This is true when writing the Latin alphabet as well: few people write capital “H” from right to left. Chinese was originally written from top to bottom in columns rather than horizontally, but the strokes within each character are generally written from left to right.
The second principle, from left to right, is maybe less universal, considering that many scripts are written from right to left. Likewise, when it comes to stroke order, I don’t think I’ve seen anybody write capital “E” with a vertical stroke and then the three horizontal strokes starting from the bottom. When it comes to stroke direction, this matters! You’ll rarely find vertical strokes written from bottom to top in any script, unless as part of a more complex character (such as the right leg of the letter “v”). The first one, from top to bottom, is easy to understand from a practical point of view it’s simply much easier to accurately pull your hand towards you than it is to push it away. Some general principles include writing strokes from top to bottom and from left to right. General principles for stroke order for Chinese characters We’re all humans with the same anatomy, writing is a very specific task and there are certain principles that just make sense.
Even though we don’t use complex characters to write our alphabet, the writing process is largely the same. However, instead of just forcing you to learn stroke order, which is what many teachers do, let’s see if I can convince you that learning stroke order is good, indeed necessary.įirst, let’s compare with English. If you came here to find good arguments to convince your teacher to let you off the hook in terms of correct stroke order, I’m afraid I have to make you disappointed. Tune in to the Hacking Chinese Podcast to listen to the related episode:Īvailable on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcast, Overcast, Spotify and many other platforms! The short answer: Yes, you need to learn stroke order With a decade and half of experience with learning and teaching the language, the answer seems clear to me now, but since no one explained it to me properly when I was a beginner, I’m going to explain why learning stroke order really is necessary. In this article, I will discuss this question, which is often asked by beginners. Aren’t there enough things to memorise as a beginner? Is it really necessary to learn the proper stroke order for writing Chinese characters? As if that wasn’t difficult enough, the teacher also had the nerve to insist that I should write all those strokes in a certain order and direction! The model characters looked very neat, but mine looked horribly disfigured. It was difficult to get the strokes in the right place, the components in the right proportions and so on. I remember learning to write Chinese characters for the first time. Stroke order example for the character 顺, “sequence”.
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