That is my question... I'm counting 15, and stroke order diagrams also show only 15 strokes... *puzzled*

The kanji dictionary on my electronic dictionary (kanjigen) says 15.

Oh yeah, and what about 戴, it says 18, counting only 17...

I thought I was long enough on this site... what am I doing wrong? Please tell me. :-)

yudantaiteki Wrote:The kanji dictionary on my electronic dictionary (kanjigen) says 15.

The study page says 16, and some other tools, like Aedict and JED on Android. RevTK seemed to be always right, maybe it's an added bonus stroke for starting RTK3

Hm... It's not that it's a big deal... Just wondering...

I don't understand everyone's obsession with stroke counts. I don't know any stroke counts for any kanji except 　一　二　三

http://jisho.org/kanji/details/稽

It SAYS 16 but there are 15 strokes in the diagram showing how to write it. Huh...

"I don't understand everyone's obsession with stroke counts. I don't know any stroke counts for any kanji except 　一　二　三"

I don't pay that much attention either except when you get 左 and 右 which are written differently.

NoSleepTilFluent Wrote:I don't understand everyone's obsession with stroke counts. I don't know any stroke counts for any kanji except 　一　二　三

It's not an obsession than rather a side effect of using RevTK. As intended it's an easy way to quickly check your writing. I even remember most stroke counts spontaneously when I see a keyword. It can be useful, but of course you could learn other things.

[Katsuo]

稽 has a variant where 匕 is replaced by 土 giving 16 strokes.

Katsuo Wrote:稽 has a variant where 匕 is replaced by 土 giving 16 strokes.

That answers the question probably pretty much... Thanks!

gyuujuice Wrote:I don't pay that much attention either except when you get 左 and 右 which are written differently.

That is because they used to be pictograms of a left and right hand. 左： 右： I found them easy to remember after noticing that the first stroke in both 右 and 口 is vertical and both 左 and 工 starts horizontally.

That is, until I started learning Chinese where they are written the same way (like 左)!

NoSleepTilFluent Wrote:I don't understand everyone's obsession with stroke counts.

I guess you've never used a paper dictionary?

Even though I use mostly computer and electronic dictionaries now, I do occasionally need to look something up in a paper dictionary where stroke count is the best way to do it.

"I found them easy to remember after noticing that the first stroke in both 右 and 口 is vertical and both 左 and 工 starts horizontally. That is, until I started learning Chinese where they are written the same way (like 左)!"

Funny you mention that, I learned the difference the same way. 工 is long and horizontal and 右 is usually handwritten taller than wide. I usually write kanji way because they make more sense most of the time and I can't keep 'em straight. XD

NoSleepTilFluent Wrote:I don't understand everyone's obsession with stroke counts. I don't know any stroke counts for any kanji except 　一　二　三

Couldn't you just potentially... count the amount of strokes you are writing if you wanted to know how many strokes a character is?

If you're writing them the proper way, it should be trivial.

I use it all the time for radical-based kanji lookup because I'm not so good at readings right now.

Yeah If i had to look it up by stroke count I could. I just don't really pay attention to them while I study was my point when i said that. However, with technology even stroke counts are becoming outdated. I look up Kanji by radicals mostly or by writing it in Midori, if possible. I don't have Midori but people around me do.

yudantaiteki Wrote:

NoSleepTilFluent Wrote:I don't understand everyone's obsession with stroke counts.

I guess you've never used a paper dictionary?

Even though I use mostly computer and electronic dictionaries now, I do occasionally need to look something up in a paper dictionary where stroke count is the best way to do it.

Even with a paper dictionary, radical + stroke count is the best way to do it, if you can determine the radical. And with that method, it doesn't matter that much if it's 15 or 16 strokes, because the 禾-15 and 禾-16 characters would typically be on the same or adjacent pages.

Excuse me but what is Midori? (yes I know what 緑 is but I mean the program )

[Katsuo]

Midori J-E, E-J dictionary with handwriting input for iPad/Pod. It gets good reviews, but I haven't tried it myself.

You count 16 strokes, what do you get? Another day older and deeper in debt.

NoSleepTillFluent Wrote:I don't understand everyone's obsession with stroke counts. I don't know any stroke counts for any kanji except 　一　二　三

gyuujuice Wrote:I don't pay that much attention either except when you get 左 and 右 which are written differently.

I don't follow. How does knowing the number of strokes help there? ‘Correct’ stroke order doesn't matter, either, actually. ;p I think I would've gone mad if I'd paid attention to ‘the’ rather than ‘a’ stroke order and counted strokes when learning the kanji. I just made sure to be consistent as I wrote them, and attended to writing the primitives and kanji properly to achieve the desired character, mostly for the purpose of aiding memory, though I knew it was useful if I needed to handwrite in Japanese, also.

lernsky Wrote:Oh yeah, and what about 戴, it says 18, counting only 17...

I thought I was long enough on this site... what am I doing wrong? Please tell me. :-)

I thought I'd answer to this question because nobody else did. I hope it'll help someone.
Anyway there is a variant to this kanji which has different writing. Same as 稽 which has variant where 匕 is replaced by 土.

Anyway in 戴 variant ⺾ (grass radical) is written with 4 strokes (writing order: -| -|) instead of 3 (writing order:-||). So there's the extra stroke.

Both variants which have +1 strokes are not common so I wouldn't worry about them. Unless you'd like to know all kanjis there are :-)

Vaste Wrote:

gyuujuice Wrote:I don't pay that much attention either except when you get 左 and 右 which are written differently.

I found them easy to remember after noticing that the first stroke in both 右 and 口 is vertical and both 左 and 工 starts horizontally.

I think I read a discussion about these somewhere else in the forum. Regardless, my explanation for the stroke order (getting a bit OT now started with stroke counts...) is that a writing with regularly changing directions (horizontally-vertically) is preferred, or rather that stroke order that preserves the smoothest possible motion of the writer's hand.
Beautifully in 我.
Or also the changing of directions in 華.
See my story for 華: http://kanji.koohii.com/study/kanji/splendor

dacker Wrote:

lernsky Wrote:Oh yeah, and what about 戴, it says 18, counting only 17...

I thought I was long enough on this site... what am I doing wrong? Please tell me. :-)

I thought I'd answer to this question because nobody else did. I hope it'll help someone.
Anyway there is a variant to this kanji which has different writing. Same as 稽 which has variant where 匕 is replaced by 土.

Anyway in 戴 variant ⺾ (grass radical) is written with 4 strokes (writing order: -| -|) instead of 3 (writing order:-||). So there's the extra stroke.

Both variants which have +1 strokes are not common so I wouldn't worry about them. Unless you'd like to know all kanjis there are :-)

Thanks for pointing that out! I will not ask myself any questions about stroke counts until I finished RTK3

[Katsuo]

dacker Wrote:in 戴 variant ⺾ (grass radical) is written with 4 strokes (writing order: -| -|) instead of 3 (writing order:-||). So there's the extra stroke.

I can't see where ⺾ (grass/ 草冠) comes into this character. Checking etymology in paper dictionaries it seems that the first two strokes, (i.e. "十" of Heisig's primitive called "thanksgiving") has an older three-stroke version where an extra horizontal stroke cuts the vertical. Maybe the stroke count variation comes from that.

Yeah probably. I took the grass radical because it reminded me the most of that element of kanji. Unfurtunately I don't know the classification Heisig used.

You can check out the SOD from 8th stroke on at Jisho:


So instead of writing something that looks like grass radical you write (-| -|). But one would have to check the etymology for this kanji for more detail about the variant.

[Katsuo]

Checking out 異 as a separate character, there's a version of it where ⺾ is broken into + + so maybe your idea is correct.

Note how 艹 (flower, i.e. grass radical) looks like "十十" but is written as "|- -|" in Taiwan. AFAIK it used to be written 艸. Also, there's another primitive that looks almost the same as 艹. It's written in the same order, but looks like "-| |-", i.e. the strokes don't cross. This can be seen in e.g. 夢, and also in 寬茍敬警蔑襪 (for fun also compare 苟茍).

Stroke order:
花： 草： 夢： 敬：