Chinese vs. English: Stroke Order

Chinese writing is cool. All characters are meant to fit in an equal-sized box. There are no spaces to break up words. Many characters are made from two other characters smushed into the same-size box. And clearly, these characters are complex compared to what we see in English.

Here's what English-speakers don't appreciate, or at least what I didn't appreciate until I started writing Chinese characters: Stroke order matters. Stroke order goes a long way towards forming the character correctly and making it "look" right. Stroke order helps manage the total space of the character within the box and it helps stay consistent with the proportions of angles and line segments within the characters. You might not appreciate it when learning to write 十 (shí, "ten"), or even 不 (bù, "no" or a generic negation), but you definitely appreciate it when writing a character like 我 (wǒ, "I"). Stroke order can make all the difference.

Just try drawing 我 some other way. I think you'll find this stroke order funnest, fastest, and most effective.
Source: wenlininstitute.org

My Chinese friends have commented that my Chinese handwriting is good (when I remember how to draw the characters at all). There's a counterintuitive explanation I hold for this: my handwriting is good because I am a beginner. As a beginner to Chinese characters, my knowledge of characters is not yet built-up enough to know when a sloppily written version of one character becomes another character entirely. My knowledge of only a few dozen characters, knowing there are yet thousands more, causes me to pay attention to penmanship.

English has 26 letters. Multiply by two for capitals. Add 10 digits. Now add in that we put in spaces between our words and that we pick up frequencies of letters and tuples of letters (rarely a q without a u, common suffixes -ing, -er, -ed, etc.). Just a smattering of punctuation added on top. A lifetime of English allows me the luxury of sloppy penmanship, secure in the knowledge that other English speakers will aggressively prune my hastily-spewed chicken-scratch into something intelligible.

Many software developers cite their poor penmanship as a source of pride. For me, this is related to the cryptic signatures doctors leave on prescriptions. The sloppier the penmanship, the harder to duplicate, and therefore the more status afforded to the owner of the hand. I saw to it that the signature I would develop for credit card receipts would skirt any pretension to legibility. But now I'm studying Chinese, so let's take another look at stroke order for English letters. A quick Google search turned up the following:

From superenglishkid.com

There are a few other competing stroke orders for English letters (noted by this Quora answer), because there are so few characters compared to Chinese that we can usually puzzle our way from intention to representation as writers and back again from representation to idea as readers.

What I found common to the few English stroke-order diagrams was that they heavily favored downward strokes for many characters. When I write A, V, v, W, or w, the diagrams start each stroke at the top, whereas my strokes have developed an up-and-over or down-and-around quality, linking the first two strokes of A and V into one and turning my W/w into one continuous stroke. It's kind of fun to try to follow this other stroke order. The capital M in the above diagram really sticks out to me. My M is a left-down stroke, a single stroke for a half-height 'v' in the middle linked to the right downstroke as a finisher. The above diagram shows M as four strokes, the first two setting up left and right goal posts. I can't help seeing something similar to the Chinese way of writing diverse characters into repeatable square boxes.

It's been a joy to continue studying English and Chinese. The languages are so distant from one another. The greater the distance, the greater the appreciation for human thought and reasoning that transcends expression.