Lesson 14 - Stroke Order

If you plan on learning Chinese, you'd better be familiar with stroke order.  Most people get intimidated by the fact that they not only have to learn new squigglies, but also the order in which to draw them.  What sort of torture is that?

Thank goodness it's not a curse, but a blessing.  If it weren't for stroke order, Chinese characters really would just be a bunch of chaotic scratches on the page.  Stroke order helps you remember the characters and make them look a lot nicer and more uniform.

Think of it this way: If you drew your boxes starting on the top right corner and going around counter clockwise while your friend started at the lower left and went clockwise, how similar would your boxes be?  (The Chinese way of drawing a box is as shown below.)

Stroke order generally follows the rule of top to bottom and then left to right.

An example of stroke order for
言 (yan2) speech.

The important part here is practicing.  With enough practice (and trust me, you'll be surprised at how fast you can pick it up), you don't even need someone to show you the stroke order.  You'll be able to accurately guess.  And if you switch the order of 2 strokes, big deal.  No one's watching you write, they just care about the end result.

Why else is it important to learn stroke order?  Ever wondered how the Chinese organize their characters into a dictionary?  That's right!  They organize it by the number of strokes.

Additionally, it can be really important to know stroke order if you want to find the meaning of a character.  Since Chinese does not have a phonetic alphabet, if you see a new character you would want to learn, but don't know the pinyin to type it and find out the meaning on Google translate, your only option at that point is to physically write out the character on a trackpad or similar device.  If you don't know your stroke order, it can be impossible to find the character you're after.

Here's a really good website to look up stroke order on any characters you're interested in learning.
http://www.archchinese.com/chinese_english_dictionary.html

Here is a list of characters that I think are worth learning right off the bat.  Their relative stroke orders are often confused.  Hopefully these can help you get started.

我 (wo3) I

这 (zhe4) this

女 (nü3/nv3) woman

加油！ Good luck!  If you have any questions (this stuff can be a little tricky at first), feel free to leave a comment below.