Rare characters, especially complex ones, can have several common stroke orders.

Rael89 wrote:

When my regular sites don't have the stroke order I go here:

http://www.yellowbridge.com/chinese/cha … =%E5%85%82

It has yet to fail me in finding a rare or odd character.

While it's good as a last resort I suppose, Chinese and Japanese stroke order often differs.

While I understand that your character was just an example, it's pretty obvious what the stroke order should be if you've been paying attention to the stroke orders for all the jouyou.

Last edited by Jarvik7 (2010 March 31, 8:54 am)

Jarvik7 wrote:

While I understand that your character was just an example, it's pretty obvious what the stroke order should be if you've been paying attention to the stroke orders for all the jouyou.

The one thing that I've learned through this process is that nothing is obvious to me when it comes to 漢字!  (E.g. see my comments on 殿上眉/天上眉 at the very end of http://forum.koohii.com/viewtopic.php?pid=98509#p98509 .)

In fact, I do pay a great deal of attention to stroke order (if anything I do it too much), and still whatever intuition about stroke order I may have developed from this is routinely wrong whenever I'm confronted with an unknown character.  Here are a few examples, off the top of my head:

九 vs 力
反 vs 成
恵 vs 由
叫 vs 収
升 vs 我 (or 刑)
升 vs 飛
栃 vs 励
蚕 vs 笑
猿 vs 遠

In all these pairs, whatever one learns from the first one, leads one astray with the second one.  (Not all of these illustrate a stroke order issue, strictly speaking.  In the (栃/励) and (蚕/笑) pairs, the stroke orders of the corresponding parts match, but the direction of one of the strokes differs.  The last pair (猿/遠) is admittedly borderline: here the difference is neither in stroke order or direction, but in the presence or absence of the hook that terminates the antepenultimate stroke of the RHS component.)

I've checked these examples against various sources, so I'm pretty sure I'm working with the most widely accepted 書き順/書き方 for these characters, not rare variants.

There are several other puzzling cases that I'm now forgetting, or that don't fit neatly into pairs of contrasting cases like the ones above.  (For example, the stroke order for the last 3 strokes of 斉 surprises, even though I can't really explain why...  And my brain insists on drawing the leftmost stroke 尸 first, no matter how much I try to teach it otherwise.)

Last edited by gfb345 (2010 April 01, 4:50 am)

LazyNomad wrote:

http://kakijun.main.jp/

EDIT: sorry, this site has no stroke order for this very kanji, but usually is very helpful.

You can request that they add stroke orders for kanji that they're missing.