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Would you say these stroke order rules are generally accurate and worth learning? Or do the rules have so many exceptions it’s better to not bother?
http://japanese.about.com/blqow23.htm
If these are accurate, is there a better list of general rules to consider?
I’m not looking for a short cut here, but something to fall back on in a pinch.
There is a post over on tofugu.com that goes into this.
Hm, interesting. I can’t help but notice the two don’t match up exactly. They’re close in a lot of ways. I suspect the best answer is to learn a fair number of kanji and these rules will become second nature?
I think the “rules” are a pretty good guide. Granted there are some exceptions (there will always be exceptions) but I find that the exceptions make the readings easier to learn, so there is a silver lining. Also, if the guide isn’t enough it helps to find how a radical is written.
That makes sense.
It also sounds like the exceptions are pretty rare which is a nice change of pace. ;0
A good example of an exception helping me with the definition would be the kanji for right and left.
Stroke order is one of those things I’ll do to improve my handwriting when it will actually matter, which is probably not going to be until you are in Japan. You can still have perfectly respectable handwriting without knowing the stroke order too.
Focus on grammar and vocab, more important to me for sure.
Yggbert:
Stroke order is one of those things I’ll do to improve my handwriting when it will actually matter, which is probably not going to be until you are in Japan. You can still have perfectly respectable handwriting without knowing the stroke order too.
Focus on grammar and vocab, more important to me for sure.@Yggbert – That was my initial position as well. What I found was when I’m trying to read I need to look up a kanji. I can sometimes quickly find the kanji using radicals. Other times I can waste an hour, and still not find it. Now, even with my incredibly limited writing experience I can find kanji more quickly by guessing the stroke order. It hasn’t always worked out for me, but I expect that’s where more experience will come into play. Still, it saves me time, and it is something I need to do eventually anyway, so I might as well integrate it into my studies.
I can’t take credit for this discovery though. It was MissingNo15 that pointed it out to me.
Also, when I learned to write hiragana I found my reading speed and accuracy went up notably, so there is something to be said for that advantage as well.
I’m kind of on the fence on this subject. I do want to learn to write Kana and more importantly Kanji, but I don’t want to spend too much time on it, seeing as I won’t need to write in Japanese until I’m either in Japan or doing a class.
Yeah I’ll look into the stroke order stuff when I move to Japan in 3 years, until then I’d rather focus on things that benefit me, I don’t really need to look up kanji anymore so that benefit isn’t too handy.
That makes sense. Although, I must confess it seems like an awful lot to learn all at once. Maybe it’s not so bad. I’m trying to do 5 a day, we’ll see if that’s a realistic pace, and so far it’s not that bad.
I know it’s not like people have stopped handwriting completely, but with technology so dominant and even native Japanese people experiencing ‘Kanji Amnesia’, this does make me think that learning to hand write is a waste of time. On the flip side, you never know when you might need to hand write something and I’d hate to live in Japan without at least having some skill of being able to write. As you can see, I can’t decide what to do, haha :D
My plan is to do the top 100 most used kanji. I guess it will help you guess better for the ones you don’t know. You might look like a gaijin in a pinch, but people or software will probably know what you mean.
At the same time one rule of language learning I keep hearing over and over is everyone learns it differently, so find what works for you. I’ve already seen a gain. Yggbert doesn’t think he will, so that’s an easy choice for him. If you’re uncertain I’d conduct a small trail period, and see what you think.
> Would you say stroke order rules are worth learning?
No. When learning to write kanji, you should refer to stroke diagrams, and those will tell you the order and direction for each stroke. So you don’t need to learn any rules separately.
Now whether you should learn how to write kanji, that is a separate question. I think the answer is yes. But not for any reason you might expect. For me it comes down to this: I’m at my limit of how much time I can spend doing other things.
I do 50 sentence reps in Anki, watch one half-hour TV show, read one chapter of Bakuman, and then read a few pages of another comic at bed time. I do that every day, and I go to a conversation group once a week. I can’t do any more of those things than I am already doing. Everyone has a limit, and that is my limit, at least for now.
I’m sure there are people who do more, others who do less, and still others who get burned out because they try to do too much, especially when it comes to flash cards. But that is another topic for another thread.
The point is that even while doing those things, I can still find 5-10 minutes to do some kanji writing practice every day. That is because writing practice is different enough from the other things that it feels like a totally unrelated activity, and when I’m sick of doing sentence reps in Anki, I can still find some motivation to practice writing kanji.
So if you say there are more productive study methods out there, you are right. You are right up until you hit your limit. Then once you hit your limit, you have to make a choice between doing nothing and doing some kanji writing practice. If you don’t do the writing practice, you are missing a good opportunity to spend a little extra time with Japanese every day.
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