{"id":207,"date":"2008-08-13T13:00:48","date_gmt":"2008-08-13T20:00:48","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/nihongo.3yen.com\/?p=17"},"modified":"2010-10-23T09:52:15","modified_gmt":"2010-10-23T14:52:15","slug":"finding-out-stroke-order-and-direction","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.guidetojapanese.org\/blog\/2008\/08\/13\/finding-out-stroke-order-and-direction\/","title":{"rendered":"What’s the stroke order of \u3010\u9f9c\u3011? Who cares?"},"content":{"rendered":"

This is yet another post that’s been picking up cruft in my draft folder for over three years.<\/em><\/p>\n

Stroke order is one of those things that might seem difficult at first but actually comes quite naturally with a bit of practice. You just have to make sure you learn the the correct order of the most important radicals such as \u53e3 and \u7530. You should also pay careful attention to radicals like \u5382 that have more stroke orders than you would think. (Hint: it’s more than 1.)<\/p>\n

Once you learn the stroke order for the most common radicals, you can figure out the rest for most kanji by yourself with general principles like the following.<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. Stroke orders generally go from top to bottom and left to right (from the top-left corner to bottom-right corner).<\/li>\n
  2. Vertical lines that go straight through are written last as opposed to those that connect (\u5341 vs \u571f\uff09.<\/li>\n
  3. Stuff that encloses something else gets drawn first but closed last \uff08\u56de and \u56e3\uff09.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    When in doubt or for weird kanji like \u5fc5, you can always check the stroke order on the WWWJDIC<\/a> by looking up the kanji and clicking on the SOD link. You’ll get a nice animated gif like this one<\/a>.<\/p>\n

    However, the problem with these animations is that it only gives you the order and not the direction of each stroke. If you’re confused about stroke direction, another site you might want to try is gahoh<\/a>, which has animated .mov files with the direction and order. Here’s one for \u5fc5<\/a>.<\/p>\n

    Their collection isn’t as complete as the WWWJDIC but it is useful for odd or crazy and complicated kanji like \u9f9c<\/a>. The request page<\/a> in particular has some of the odder and trickier kanji like \u51f8\u3001\u51f9\u3001\u98db\u3001 and \u5375 so you might want to check it out and double-check your stroke order.<\/p>\n

    So how useful is it to learn the proper stroke order of \u9f9c? Not very but hey it’s fun times for everybody, right? Right? Hello? ………anybody?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    This is yet another post that’s been picking up cruft in my draft folder for over three years. Stroke order is one of those things that might seem difficult at first but actually comes quite naturally with a bit of … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,5,11,13],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-207","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-advanced","category-beginner","category-kanji","category-learning-resources"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.guidetojapanese.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/207","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.guidetojapanese.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.guidetojapanese.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.guidetojapanese.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.guidetojapanese.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=207"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.guidetojapanese.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/207\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.guidetojapanese.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=207"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.guidetojapanese.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=207"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.guidetojapanese.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=207"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}