I started learning Japanese in 1996. When I began learning Mandarin in 1998, I already had a foundation in Chinese characters, thanks to my Japanese studies. Learning the two languages at the same time, I was frequently annoyed by little discrepancies such as 歩 and 步, 別 and 别, 氷 and 冰, etc. Those little character details caught my attention, though. I ended up writing my senior thesis on how and why the Chinese characters of the Chinese and Japanese writing systems ended up diverging.
One little detail that always nagged at me, though, was stroke order. The truth is, stroke order of Chinese characters is not consistent across Japanese and Chinese. I was reminded of this recently by Tae Kim’s blog entry entitled, What’s the stroke order of 【龜】? Who cares? He brought up the stroke order of the character 必 as an example of a “weird character.” This character just happens to be one of the ones whose correct stroke order has been ever so slightly bugging me all these years.
必 is a great example, because it shows up in plenty of relatively simple words in both languages, like 必要 (necessary) and 必须 (must) in Chinese, and 必ず (without fail) and 必要 (necessary) in Japanese.
Now let’s take a look at the stroke order of this simple character. I’ll have to assign letters to each stroke so that we can keep the different stroke orders straight:
Chinese 必:
- Ocrat, MDBG, and Wenlin all say A-B-C-D-E.
- Learn to Write Characters (click on 必), maintained by Dr. Tim Xie, says A-B-C-E-D.
- A-B-C-E-D makes a lot of sense to me, because the character’s radical is 心 (but that doesn’t necessarily matter at all).
- Remember that Chinese has the added excitement of the simplified/traditional divide, as well as other regional differences in the mainland, Taiwan, and Hong Kong.
- If you have more to add to this (especially from more authoritative sources). please leave a comment!
Japanese 必:
- WWWJDIC, Kawatsu, Kodansha, and Gakken all agree on the bizarre C-D-B-A-E.
- It’s almost as is they’re writing 义 first, then adding “wings,” but no, the radical here is 心 as well. (We can see why Tae calls it weird.)
Hmmm, that’s a lot of inconsistency. Gives you more respect for the people that can create good Chinese handwriting recognition software, doesn’t it?
But wait! It doesn’t end there. An even simpler character — 出 — behaves inconsistently as well. I’ll spare you all the details and jump to a diagram taken from a very interesting tool I found illustrating various stroke order differences:
Note that aside from the incredibly common 出, the heart radical 忄 — a component of tons of very common characters — is also among the ambiguously stroke-ordered. Notice too that the Japanese-only variants are not included in this list.
So what’s my point? Well, it’s not any of the following:
- Chinese is really hard
- Chinese characters are really complex
- Chinese characters are hard to learn
- Chinese character stroke order is fun!
Chinese is not semi-mystical. Chinese characters were created by people a really long time ago, and thus it is an amazingly imperfect, inconsistent system. East Asian brains aren’t semi-mystical either; with all these differences going on you can bet that the Chinese and Japanese get mixed up too. In fact, armed with the chart above you’ll find it really easy to spark debates with very literate Chinese over the “correct stroke order.”
Like me, you may be bugged by these inconsistencies. You may feel compelled to seek out some underlying pattern or just memorize a big list of exceptions. Don’t do it! Be satisfied with a quick look over the chart above. Just get the non-exceptional stroke order basics down and you’ll be fine, trust me. Don’t obsess over perfect stroke order and all the exceptions, because it’s an imperfect system. The deck is stacked against you. Learn to read and use characters to communicate, and you win.
Hi John,
Thanks a lot. It’s a great and intriguing article, as always. I fully agree with you. Being obsessed with so-called “authentic stroke orders” is just ridiculous. What you need is to follow some basic rules, such as “top to bottom” and “left to right”.
The most laughable example is 右 and 左 in Japanese. Look at the following pages. Why are they different from each other? I guess there might be a profound calligraphical reason behind that. I don’t know their most orthodox stroke orders in Chinese. Do you know them?
（右） http://www.winttk.com/kakijun/1/10002.htm （左） http://www.winttk.com/kakijun/1/10024.htm
The most important thing about strokes is NOT what stroke order to write a character in, but how to count the correct number of strokes in a Chinese character, which is vital when you look up in a Chinese dictionary. If you can’t get a correct stroke number, your stroke orders are absolutely wrong.
August 19th, 2008 at 1:45 pmchangye,
Ha ha, I remember learning the 右 and 左 stroke orders in Japanese years ago. I remembered them with this mnemonic: “左 starts on the left, 右 starts on the right.”
I agree that stroke count is more important, but in this digital age it’s getting less and less vital. These days almost everything I look up is done digitally via copy and paste… :)
August 19th, 2008 at 2:12 pmYeh.. I’ve never really understood the massive emphasis on stroke order myself. I haven’t learnt how to write and can barely read hanzi but even so I am more concerned with 1. Identifying the ‘count’ as changye suggests, and also 2. Identifying the radical(s) that make up the whole.
From a digital point of view, I am more concerned with the pinyin as that is how I input using the IME. The pinyin has a two-fold benefit in that it contains the english pronunciation of the character. To me the character represents the pinyin, rather than the other way around. For example the symbol @ stands for ‘at’, or the symbol 3 stands in the place for the word ‘three’.
May be that’s my western mind trying to make sense of it all but ultimately, stroke order has extremely low relevance to me. It’s a fascinating topic, that’s for sure but that’s all.
August 19th, 2008 at 5:55 pmVery important for serious students of the Chinese language to know this to avoid confusion when encountering alternate stroke-orders, or when being told that the stroke order that one learned correctly is “wrong”.
I hope fellow readers will not think that John is saying stroke order is not important.
If a student wants to learn to write Chinese by hand, it is important to stick with one of the correct stroke orders. It is easier to remember something you do the same way each time. Not only is it easier mentally, but “muscle memory” kicks in and helps too. Inattention to stroke order could be one factor in a person never learning to write Chinese by hand.
Two other reasons stroke order is important to a serious student: Eventually, one’s characters can become cursive. At that point, a correct form of stroke order will keep the characters recognizable.
Finally, stroke order is a part of the language’s “culture”.
I have found it important to know the general rules (top to bottom, etc.) AND to learn the details for individual components and characters that the general rules don’t really make clear. Also, I know that I sometimes make mistakes.
I think the point of John’s very helpful post is that stroke order systems are not perfect, not that stroke order is unimportant.
August 19th, 2008 at 10:05 pmI guess it’s harder to standardize stroke order in one of the largest countries in the world. I think the stroke order for Japanese is pretty consistent within itself. One odd inconsistency I noticed wasn’t even Kanji but も. For 左 and 右, I didn’t even bother learning the “official” order and just use the same order as 友. Stroke order in general is important but you have to pick your battles and let some minor things slide.
By the way, those minor differences annoy me too! I recently realized 単 was different in Chinese and was writing it wrong for the longest time.
Finally, 必須（ひっす） is used in Japanese as well though not as common as the Chinese version.
August 20th, 2008 at 12:30 amWell, I write (not sure whether I learned it that way, though) 必 ABCDE, simply because it’s normal to write form left to right. I pity those little schoolkids (by the way, yesterday I read an article of an English language newspaper about Chinese schools, referring to the pupils as abecedarians!) who have to grapple with these subtleties, but we’ve all gone through the same process. Perhaps I got more than my fair share because my father is an avid calligraphist, albeit only on a leisure time basis. I have never been fond of rote learning, so I resisted most of those educational formalities. No wonder I didn’t get into a prestigious university. Regarding the importance of the stroke order, if you practise calligraphy or, more likely, start writing cursive script(that is, not “copying” computer font but have your own handwriting), you should pay attention to the proper order, otherwise your characters could look weird and might not be recognisable. But that’s only in extreme cases. But: Once, during a lesson, wrote something in big characters on the board. My usually dead silent students began to whisper. I turned around and inquired about the source of their confusion. No one dared explain but I found out later that they were amused because I’d got the stroke order of 极 (as in 基极) wrong…
August 20th, 2008 at 12:35 amA question for changye and other speakers of Japanese - apart from the 右/左 issue*, are there any more bizarre stroke orders like abovementioned 必? Don’t you get immensely confused (I mean, even more than the occasional bewilderedness about one’s own mother tongue) or are the underlying basic rules very different from Chinese?
(And let’s please ignore that I called my dad a calligraphist instead of calligrapher. Why on earth are there so many different endings for nouns that describe a persons job or pursuit? Greek roots? Latin?)
- (the top part were different “hands” in ancient times, with each character having the appropriate “hand” element, the stroke order had to be different, similarity and standardisation cause both characters to be written in a similar fashion with the two top strokes on the left…then again, why did Japanese retain the original idea, albeit in a stripped down way?)
August 20th, 2008 at 12:52 amInteresting. I had the same experience when first studying Chinese (after completing a B.A. in Japanese language). The first characters that really got me were 生 and 田. It seems that in both cases my Japanese teachers preferred vertical before horizontal and my Chinese teachers visa-versa.
Oh, and that “very interesting tool” crashes my firefox!
August 20th, 2008 at 2:00 amLike Mark said, it crashes Firefox for me, too! I was loading the page, and then it disappeared, and I was like, “Huh?” Then, I tried it again, same result. Try Explorer, I suppose?
I got annoyed with the stroke order when I found that some of my books mention there being several different ways to write a character, even some that seem rather simple. So, I’m glad I’m not the one who’s been having trouble with “必.”
August 20th, 2008 at 9:10 amThanks for this one!
It truely deserves to become a CPod lesson - spread the word out to all the other learners.
August 20th, 2008 at 5:00 pmNooo! Internet Explorer shuts off, too! Maybe American computers don’t feel like studying Chinese characters. Any way to get around the browser crashing?
Anyways, I go ABCED.
August 21st, 2008 at 1:52 amI was told that if you get the stroke order wrong, then native speakers can’t read your writing. I never understood this, if it looks the same, then it looks the same. Any enlightenment on this one?
August 23rd, 2008 at 7:47 pmI have one of those pocket-sized folding electronic dictionaries, which I use to look up Chinese words by writing them on the LCD screen. The software used for character-recognition is apparently quite stroke-order-sensitive– even for relatively simple characters such as 口 (mouth). You can draw a perfect square in the box, but if it is the wrong stroke order, then the dictionary will not only not recognize it, but 口 will not even be included in the list of “closely-related second-choice characters” it shows.
Makes me thankful that my teachers at the Univeristy of Texas a few years back were strict about teaching correct stroke order :)
August 23rd, 2008 at 10:25 pmSome great comments here! Sorry for being slow to respond. Time to clarify a few things…
Alaric,
YES! It’s definitely important to get the basics down. Just don’t obsess over the types of inconsistencies I’ve outlined in the post.
This point relates to what Scott in Tainan writes:
Scott (and krovvy), it’s not that the software can only recognize characters written in the correct order (theoretically, the software could recognize any order at all). The real issue is that when Chinese people write in a more cursive script, the strict form is lost, and it’s the stroke order which enables the program (or the reader) to recognize the character.
August 24th, 2008 at 7:50 pmAs a native writer of Chinese who recently started to learn Japanese, stroke order is something that’s already internalized through years of writing, and I don’t really think about it consciously when I write.
So when I’m taught a Kanji that’s not used in Chinese (mostly because it’s in traditional script), I’ll usually try to remember and visualize it in terms of the radicals that it’s made up of, and being able to reproduce each radical usually means you get the stroke order correct.
Having said that, writing Kanji like 飛 and 機 do pose a real challenge, as I can’t say I’m 100% sure of their stroke order.
In any case, I don’t think there’s a need for an attempt to standardize the stroke orders across both languages since what matters most is frankly how the characters turn out eventually. And as you mentioned, there’s no standard even within Chinese.
August 24th, 2008 at 10:58 pm“…The software used for character-recognition is apparently quite stroke-order-sensitive…”
Of course, I wasn’t referring to character-recognition software in GENERAL (because I know absolutely nothing about the subject!), but rather about the software used in the particular dictionary that I have, which is the Besta brand.
Different brands probably use different software. The one I have relies more on stroke order than on form.
I keep wondering when dictionary brands like Besta are going to start producing electronic dictionaries that are easier for non-Chinese to use and marketing them outside of Asia.
I tried using PlecoDict on my Palm PDA, but I finally lost patience with having to re-boot and re-install everything over and over. My new dictionary cost about $63 US, and fits in a pocket.
August 26th, 2008 at 10:34 am’stroke order’ had been a nightmare for Chinese and means little important.
I am Chinese born in 1926. I started practising caligraphy since nine years old. A majority of Characters are very complicated for me to follow the stroke order when I wrote.
In the computer era, writing is much less a must. The keyboard can do much much better writing job instead. I have no objection in the study of ’stroke order’ However, I thought of that the brain being used to remember it would be a waste.
chih yuan cheng publisher Global Net Daily http://www.upilot.idv.tw Tel:886227970387 Email:chih_yuan_cheng@hotmail.com
August 27th, 2008 at 9:48 pmThere are many Japanese Characters and Chinese Characters being same in their layout but with far different meaning.
August 30th, 2008 at 5:03 pmVery interesting. I never thought there are different orders.
September 16th, 2008 at 3:54 amThis link (below) is a really interesting insight on language learning in schools. “Why language classess don’t work” (I did three months in a supposedly good school here in the PRC, only to be very dissapointed)
As I run a language school, although more innovative and unique than most, I know I am shooting myself in the foot here - Ha ha
Some great tips though…
http://www.fourhourworkweek.com/blog/2008/09/22/why-language-classes-dont-work-how-to-cut-classes-and-double-your-learning-rate-plus-madrid-update/
October 28th, 2008 at 7:05 amnot quite sure where the little dot in 機 (ji) goes please help
November 2nd, 2008 at 3:28 amYou might be interested in what Johan Bjorksten says on the subject of 必 in “Learn to Write Chinese Characters” (Yale 1994, ISBN 978-0-300-05771-3).
I found this slim volume from my local library with a view to improving my handwriting speed and aesthetics, because I know my stroke order is pretty ropey. It also helps with understanding native speakers’ semi-cursive handwriting.
Anyway, Bjorksten says the official 楷书 kaishu (standard script) stroke order is A-B-C-D-E. But he suggests that this stroke order makes it difficult to compose a “harmonious” character, and suggests instead the stroke order D-B-C-A-E. This, he says, is the 草书 caoshu (grass script) stroke order. It certainly seems more efficient to write it in this way.
This, he underlines, is one of the few exceptions of calligraphic licence with kaishu stroke order rules. I wonder how common these alternatives are in the normal handwriting of Chinese people. Thoughts?
November 3rd, 2008 at 7:32 pmMartin,
Interesting… I checked a book on 草书 characters that I have, and while it doesn’t give the exact stroke order, the visibly connecting lines seem to affirm the order you give: D-B-C-A-E.
This is also closer to the Japanese variation, just putting C after D-B rather than before.
I don’t have any other thoughts, except that this doesn’t seem to bring much clarity to an already muddled issue. :)
November 3rd, 2008 at 8:18 pm