Back to whether to hand write or not?

[Johnny20270]

^^^

..... This

[edelweis]

[deleted off topic remark]

[somethingfunny]

 

 

And some stuff like stroke order seems less than useful.

 

Less than necessary perhaps, but anyone that writes characters on a regular basis will tell you that stroke order is hugely useful.

 

Firstly, knowing the order of strokes in a radical helps massively in terms of "muscle memory".  Secondly, a lot of very ordinary Chinese people take stroke order pretty seriously, which for most people might not seem necessary, but if you're aiming for a high level its an absolute must.  

 

Admittedly its not everyones cup of tea but I'm a big calligraphy fan so I enjoy it quite a lot.  One of my favourite conversations to have with a Chinese person is about the stroke order in the 心 radical in a character like 情.  The Government changed the official order at some point so anyone my age technically writes it wrong.  Usually, they spend a long time berating me for being an ignorant foreigner and then I show them how the internet agrees with me.  Usually at this point they say the internet is wrong.  Good times.  (I'm simple.)

[Flickserve]

I am going to have to look that radical up. That's interesting.

From some Sunday classes as a teenager, I didn't pick up much Chinese ability. But somehow I managed to pick up some methodology into writing the correct stroke order which has stuck decades later. I can make a good guess of the stroke order of even complicated words getting an estimated 90-95% correct stroke order. It even surprises Chinese people that I can get so many strokes correct given that my verbal ability is so weak.

Learning the correct stroke order really helps a lot in writing fast. Never realised it could be so useful when I was younger. I don't actually write much and sometimes write words out for fun to assist internalisation. It really helps my reading ability.

[edelweis]

Knowledge of stroke order also helps read other people's handwriting, when the strokes get all linked together and the character becomes recognizable by movement and a hint of the shape.

[AdamD]

Not to mention handwriting recognition on phones and tablets. So many characters just won't appear if your stroke order is off.

[somethingfunny]

 

 

Not to mention handwriting recognition on phones and tablets. So many characters just won't appear if your stroke order is off.

 

 

Maybe I should put this in the "embarrassing moments" thread but I was trying to explain the importance of stroke order to a complete newbie by writing 我 with the complete wrong stroke order on my phone and it still recognised it.  

 

Damn Samsung and their excellent character recognition software cramping my style.

[AdamD]

Don't you hate that? Sod's Law.

[ChrisOei]

Admittedly its not everyones cup of tea but I'm a big calligraphy fan so I enjoy it quite a lot.

 

 

I know calligraphy was/is one of the important skills for the traditional Chinese scholar, but my penmanship in my native English is pretty bad. I'm quite sure that even if I spend the rest of my life studying Chinese calligraphy, I'll never be very good at it.

 

I've enjoyed studying Chinese immensely, but long-term I'd like to know some Spanish, Japanese, Korean, French, and Russian as well, and there's no way I'm going to be fluent in all of them without quadrupling my IQ and quitting my job.  So, I have to pick and choose the narrow set of skills that will get me the farthest, and -- at least for now -- it looks like writing Chinese characters is a skill I'll probably have to forgo.

 

The tip about software character recognition and stroke order is interesting -- thanks, I didn't know that. I've been using Google Translate's character recognition. I don't think that takes stroke order into account (since I've successfully looked up characters using completely random stroke orders), but it's good to know that other programs might not be as forgiving. I don't want to wind up in an airport in China only to find out I can't use my new dictionary app because I don't know the stroke order.

[Johnny20270]

I rarely write" the characters in the dictionary, always use OCR, works well except for odd scripts, pictures, signs that are too far away etc

 

But for books leaflets etc, the PLECO or Hanping is not bad