So why is stroke order important? Can't I just make the kanji without any rules?
Seriously I can draw the kanji pretty well without stroke counts.
But still, why is it important?

to show japanese people your L33T skills... honestly i don't think stroke order is that important... you aren't going to be handwriting a lot of letters in your future anyways right? but then again... if you got shipwrecked on an island and had to handwrite a message in japanese to be put in a bottle....................

or if you took caligraphy it might help to know all the stroke orders......

It would be helpful if you want to look something up in a kanji dictionary, I guess. Honestly, it's probably not that important, but why not learn to write the kanji correctly? It's not like it's hard, and I find it's easier to write good-looking kanji faster when I follow the rules.

On the other hand, I like to draw the horizontal line first inside of "rice field" instead of the vertical line, so who am I to talk?

left and right is a pain in the butt too but i got them down good now ^_^

Hmmm interesting, My definition of wy it is important is because; Well I always have this wierd thought that if I were in Japan and someone asks me to write a kanji, and like if I get the strokes wrong they'll get upset.

why would a japanese person ask a gaijin to write a kanji? haha!!!

proper stroke order will make your writing look better in some cases, especially where there is a line that should maybe be poking through somewhere or something.

That said, Japanese people always don't have perfect stroke order for everything. I bet most people have a few characters with their own idiosyncratic stroke order.

I think stroke count is more important than stroke order. If you have the wrong stroke count, it will make a diffence.

Write 田 the correct way. Then write it by drawing a box counterclockwise and filling in the 2 middle strokes. They'll probably look different.

Or write 山　by drawing 3 vertical lines and then a line on the bottom, it will be harder to get a nice looking character that way.

maybe with a proper stoke-order you could write faster AND neater ^_^ there i think we got a good reason now...

To sum it up:
Your kanji will look better
Remembering one way will help more than any way (You can kind of follow the rhythm, but without order you'll constantly be thinking what's next)
and most importantly, you can look up kanji so easily. I use IME for windows soooo much to look up kanji. Plus games for NDS or any electronic dictionary will require you to know stroke order

yes i was thinking about NDS too... good points ^_^ you can always do the rikaichan lookup too though ^_^

Actually, stroke order is VERY important if you're writing. As you begin writing faster, you start taking shortcuts, you drag the pen on the page, sometimes combine strokes, etc. - if you write in the wrong order then it will look garbled. When you look at adult handwriting, often the way to figure out what is written is to follow the flow of the pen - and if you are writing it out, they will expect the same. It's not just random rules - it's a way of making sure that the flow of handwriting has consistency between people so it can be understood. It's not just dogma - learn it right. It becomes very important in being able to read other's handwriting and various fonts and calligraphy.

good points tim ^_^

Calligraphy is an art that has developed over centuries and following the correct stroke order in any language is important for characters to look good. By putting a certain emphasis on looking good you show that you take pride in what you do. (Of course if you overdo it, it suggests you're a show off.) Not doing it right suggests that you don't bother or that you don't bother to take the effort to learn.

Of course I'm speaking for one's own language. I would suspect or at least hope that if someone saw a foreigner's handwriting, they would be more forgiving.

Another reason for good writing habits is that you reduce the risk of overuse injury. My wife's family moved around a lot during your first few years of school and so she ended up largely having to teach herself how to write English characters. And without adequate instruction, she got it all wrong. She'd start strokes in the wrong place and do all sorts of odd things. When she hit uni, she had to do so much writing, she literally got writers cramp to the extent that she developed chronic injury. She had to learn to write all over again.

I guess that sort of thing is uncommon, but it shows that you ignore the wisdom handed down over the generations at your own risk.

Chinese and Japanese actually have slightly different stroke order rules, and since the Chinese rules have been ingrained in me from years of Chinese school as a child, I use those instead.

Raichu are you sure writing a different stroke order in English could cause problems like that? I actually grip my pencil close and my wrist makes no movement no matter what stroke I do.

I think the main way to avoid stuff like injuries is to make sure your hand is always aligned with your forearm. If you are writing on a low or high surface to your body it'll put it at a bad angle and is bad for your wrist.