My apologies if this topic has been done to death before.

I was taught to write romaji in the formulaic way prescribed by the then-school standard in my state, but my own hand has long since deviated from this, with shortcuts, compressions, idiosyncratic formations and some pretty wild variations in "stroke order" - and my guess is that this is true for most adult writers to a greater or lesser extent.

It seems that kanji are very much standardized as compared with the various cursive styles taught to users of the Roman alphabet in different countries, states and eras, but am curious as to if and what extent fluent adults might play fast and loose with convention when handwriting? I realise that individual calligraphers develop stylized and artistic forms, but might they vary the stroke order itself, for example? Or is there a firm sense of kata here?

ETA: I appreciate that very standard forms are necessary given the sheer number of characters involved and the need for fine discrimination between very similar forms, and that for teaching purposes stroke order is therefore critical.

Yeah you'll never get Japanese to admit this happens outside of calligraphy but basically Calligraphy seems to me as Japanese cursive and while I don't study calligraphy or even attempt to write neat. It is not neat but people for no reason like to complement it. I would of thought they were being nice but my teachers would also comment saying they loved how I wrote and these teachers were not nice people when it came to giving compliments. But things that happens in my writing which evolved out of doing repetitions is boxes turn into R shaped things. The kanji is crooked. All the releases developed naturally as I didn't care about them when doing rtk but they just happen when I write quickly. The stacks of 言 developed light streaks between stroke similar to an exaggerated こ。That's all I can actively think of. Also my stroke order is off a lot and I try to explain to Japanese people that my kanji looks the same either way I write it and they wouldn't be able to tell if they didn't see me write some of the characters but they will not have any of it. They tell me I'm wrong and there's no way it can be the same. Not that that conversation comes up often but it does and rubs some Japanese people the wrong way when you criticize the system.

Stroke order is regular enough that I don't think people vary it much in general. They write the kanji more cursive, but that usually just means omitting strokes or running strokes together. You still follow the stroke order.

NoSleepTilFluent Wrote:Also my stroke order is off a lot and I try to explain to Japanese people that my kanji looks the same either way I write it and they wouldn't be able to tell if they didn't see me write some of the characters but they will not have any of it. They tell me I'm wrong and there's no way it can be the same.

I get that once in a while. And in most cases, it's true that if they hadn't seen me write it, they wouldn't know the difference. For the most part, I just don't let them watch me write it, and there's no problems.

if there was only one way to do it there wouldn't be slight differences between some equivalent characters used in Japanese and Chinese.

but it'd probably be better to stick with the program if you want your characters to be recognised in electronic devices.

Thanks for the replies.

Middonay, I agree, those of us learning this as a second language as adults are safest to stick with the order and form as taught, pending vastly more exposure than most of us would have here (no programme has ever been able to recognise my Romaji hand, so I'm taking no chances!) - the question was prompted more by my wondering more if those native to and/or living and working in Japan were aware of much personal idosyncracy in the execution of handwritten characters, in the sense that we might vary the writing of a T or a D depending on the form of adjacent letters and the quirks of our own hand.

That said, a heavily drilled process tends to stick, and my hazarded guess would be that that native kanji writers stick with what they learnt originally to a greater extent than we do with our standard 26 letters (I find that where I struggle with stroke order, it's because it goes against the grain in respect of the way I was taught to write the western alphabet, verticals first, then dot "i", cross "t", and add the belly of the P, but sheer exposure to kanji convention is changing that. I would imagine that muscle memory in respect of stroke order is every bit as powerful for those who learnt kanji as their native system, but was curious as to whether many adults exercised personal quirks in defiance of this once the system was mastered and in heavy use. Trust that this makes sense.)

edited for clarity

In my writing practice, when I draw a tree primitive on the left side of the kanji it is included in, the forth stroke is almost a continuation from the end of the third stroke, going bottom-left to top-right crossing the “trunk” on the way. The other one I would think of is a series of last three strokes in a thread primitive. Again when the tread is at the left side of the kanji it is a part of, those last three strokes are drawn like: left one, middle one, right one (they become practically little drops), rather than classical middle, left, right.

I noticed that some fonts indicate those orders, so I guess that these variations are acceptable amongst native kanji writes.

I found this post on Language Log (blog by linguists) about stroke order and electronic lookup systems which suggests that people (well chinese anyways) do have their own way of doing things.


http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=3533


start quote

"Finally, in order to use this particular stroke order serial code / number method (there obviously could be many other stroke order serial code / number methods, depending upon how many strokes one admitted into one's system and how one defined each of the strokes), one must scrupulously follow the exact stroke order or sequence specified by the system. If you do not, you simply will fail to find the character you are seeking. Yet, just as different Chinese people hold chopsticks in various idiosyncratic ways, so too do different Chinese people sequence the strokes of characters in various idiosyncratic ways, even though both for chopsticks and for stroke order, there is a supposedly correct way that everybody ought to follow, yet it is honored more in the breach than the observance.

Given the arbitrary nature of shape-based lookup / entry methods and the heavy demands they place upon memorization, it is no wonder that the vast majority of individuals prefer phonetic lookup / entry methods."

end quote

I don't think it's that uncommon for people to unknowingly write characters with the wrong stroke order, especially if they're not highly educated.

I think a prime candidate for being written with the wrong strong order is 可. Writing the vertical stroke before the box seems more natural, but in actuality, the box comes first.

http://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E5%8F%AF

Quote:筆順は、「一、口、亅」の順である。
筆先の移動距離が短くなる書き方を書きやすい書き方だと考え、次の文字までの移動も考慮すると、縦書きでは上述の順が書きやすい。しかし、横書きでは「一、亅、口」とした方が書きやすく、実際、この筆順で書いている人が多い。

Huh, I never knew that -- if you look at the calligraphy forms of the character that's the stroke order they're based on too.

More prime candidates for incorrect stroke order: the first two strokes creating the upper parts of 右 and 左 are different. One starts with the horizontal line, and one starts with the vertical.

Overall I follow stroke order, but some of these get pretty anal.

In the standard Chinese stroke order, both 右 and 左 start with the horizontal line, so much better. When I did RTK, years before I started studying Chinese, I couldn't help but write 右 this way all the time, "wrong" by the Japanese standards I suppose, because the way the Japanese do it didn't feel right to me at all.