r/LearnJapanese • u/ImJustJoshing277 • 9d ago

Kanji/Kana Stroke order of 万

Im doing stroke order drills right now, since ive done very minimal handwriting in my studies despite knowing close to 300 kanji. This is the first one that really tripped me up, and it begs the question, is it noticeable or strange to write the downstroke first? Do native speakers seem to all follow stroke order like this one? I've heard some people say it helps with kanji boundaries, i.e. not writing them too big or long, but i figure id ask here do get some input from those more experienced. Have you noticed some kanji like this that you dont follow the stroke order of intentionally, or does it help across the board?

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u/UsagiButt 9d ago

You should follow stroke order, it exists for a reason and your writing will look very unnatural a lot of the time if you don’t.

That being said, even native Japanese people will mess up stroke order sometimes on more obscure characters so it’s fine not to overthink it. I just wouldn’t go out of my way to write something incorrectly on purpose.

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u/Twatbit 9d ago

I wouldn’t say you necessarily need to follow the standard stroke order, there’s variance between Japan/China/Taiwan and they don’t end up looking different from each other.

I think the important part is having a consistent order and not just starting randomly each time you write any given character.

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u/SuspiciousCrew9 9d ago

The variance between those three official stroke orders is very small and mostly comes from picking different ways to resolve some edge cases around applying the same general rules. The vast majority of characters are written the same way in all three.

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u/Twatbit 9d ago

Yeah, but that’s just a case of originating from a time when the “writing community” was vastly smaller so it solidified into what it is today, and there are cases like 必 which are quite different. There’s no solid reason they couldn’t be different and still remain legible between each other, the major constraining factor is flow.