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.

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.

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

Last edited by warrigal (2012 September 25, 10:21 pm)

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

Last edited by midonnay (2012 September 26, 5:09 am)

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.

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.

Last edited by gdaxeman (2012 September 27, 2:05 am)