[steven]

I understand all that jazz about Japanese calling people out on their stroke order because I've had it happen to me all the time (I'll admit I suck at writing Japanese). I guess that my argument is that people tend to use computers these days, thus making stroke order a little less important for learners.

The fact of the matter is, if the kanji is legible then it will be accepted. There are certain situations like 北 , where if you wrote it like it is on the compture screen, it wouldn't really be recognizable. In most cases though, as long as you proportions and angles and all that are OK, then you will pass go. Case in point, I've turned in loads of official documents where I'm sure my stroke order was less than perfect on select kanji, but most of them were OK. I've never had something returned to me because my stroke order was bad. On the other hand, my wife (Japanese) who obviously has decent "natural" looking writing, got something returned because she didn't close the box on 西.

I'll admit it though... my argument does sound a little silly. If you're gonna study kanji and write them a million times, you might as well write your strokes in the correct order. There's no real harm in that-- it might take you a little while to get your hand muscles used to doing it, but that would probably go for the wrong stroke order as well.

"Likewise, knowing the stroke order in turn enables you to write a few strokes in one as well, which is a huge time-saver."

That's something that I'll agree with. Although there were time saving methods in writing kanji the wrong way, once you start to understand it you can start 'flowing' when you write. Even still though... when you get the stroke orders down you still have to worry about proportion and all that good stuff. There's no end to it.

If we're gonna compare it to English, I'd rather read really legible slightly mispelled childish block letters than some doctor's ridiculous wanna-be cursive. I've seen some Japanese writing like that where I have to ask multiple natives to figure out what it says (like when checking homework... sometimes I can't even read someone's name because it's so messy!)

No offense to Mr. Sashimister, but I feel like sometimes Japanese put a little bit too much focus on the nuances of writing. Like you'd have to be an idiot to not be able to read the 西 my wife wrote... but it still got turned down. Sometimes I get the feeling that some of this is entirely arbitrary too. I base that off of the fact that there seems to be this phantom stroke order for English and Arabic numerals. Not only that, but I've heard that Chinese kanji (some of which are identical and some of which are similar) have different stroke orders than Japanese kanji. Please correct me if I'm wrong. I'm not trying to justify crappy hand writing, but i'm just saying don't pull your hair out over it.

Do we agree that Toast should learn hiragana/katakana before kanji though? Something I'd like to point out is that learning the stroke order of hiragana/katakana is a very important step in learning the stroke order for kanji. It's funny because I don't recall ever being taught the stroke order for hiragana or katakana, but when kanji came along the teacher (who wasn't Japanese) tried to like teach us what he "remembered" to be correct, which in hindsight had some mistakes. Either way, the componants of kanji are basically comprised of hiragana and katakana. So if all you learn is hiragana and katakana and decide to study teh language for a while before hitting kanji, I'd suggest going back and reviewing the stroke order of hiragana and katakana before moving on. I took a huge break from studying Japanese (which is ironically when I learned the most). I had found some old 小１年生 practice books and started from the very beginning. It felt like a waste of time at first, but there were a few mistakes I found in my hiragana and katakana that consequently made my kanji look nicer.