Today I will be exposing my past as someone who did not care about stroke order by comparing actual stroke order to how I used to write some characters. The title of this post is actually not 100% true because sometimes I still write some of these characters incorrectly...it’s just so hard to break old habits.
In retrospect, I think the real stroke order makes a lot of sense thinking about how 少 is written. But I do remember being surprised when I learned I was writing this character incorrectly.
I believe I mentioned in a previous post that I used to write the left half of 那 like 月. And I was also writing the right part wrong too! Fortunately I’ve been very successful in correcting this and now write 那 with the proper stroke order consistently.
For both 北 and 比, I was writing the right component in incorrect order. I also wrote the left part of 比 incorrectly, and I wouldn’t be surprised if I was also messing up the direction of strokes...I can’t remember exactly now.
To this day, the proper stroke order for 长 remains unintuitive to me. But I have been good about following proper stroke order regardless. Honestly, I feel like the character doesn’t look as neat when I use correct stroke order, but I do think like the strokes flow better together.
I find myself having to look up stroke order for this character and characters like 贯 from time to time. It just won’t stick!
This is a small discrepancy, but I honestly feel like it makes a difference in my handwriting. I guess 为 in an exception because it is written like the incorrect way I wrote 力.
I am embarrassed to say I just learned how incorrectly I write this character today. I think I knew I was doing something wrong, but I didn’t realize just how wrong I was. I’m going to have to work on this from now on.
For 我, I’m not 100% sure that the incorrect order above is exactly how I used to write, but it’s close. 我 was always a really challenging character for me, and while I don’t think my current 我s are perfect, I noticed a big improvement when I learned the proper stroke order. The improper 我s above look fine too, but I think it’s because my handwriting is neat in general.
I have known for a long time that I struggle with remembering the stroke order for 里. Since how I’ve always written it is pretty close to the correct order, it’s quite challenging to correct myself.
This one is pretty bad because I even had the wrong number of strokes! How I used to write it was not very natural feeling, so it’s pretty easy for me to remember the proper order.
Last but not least, here are some characters that I was just writing blatantly incorrectly.
I’m very mortified to say that I only realized these discrepancies relatively recently. For 黄 I literally realized it last week. I guess I just didn’t ever look close enough, yikes. 练 is also pretty bad because I’ve always written 锻炼的炼 correctly, so I really have no excuse. With 勇 I feel like it’s quite hard to tell with certain fonts or small text, so that’s the one I’m least ashamed about.
Well, this has been embarrassing. Now I’m going to be paying a lot more attention to stroke order. You can teach an old dog new tricks, but it takes a lot of work. That’s why you should pay attention to stroke order upfront!
hi! could I ask about how you would write the characters for the name "zhou yuze", as well as pronunciation?
Well, I have no way of knowing what characters are for "yuze". There are way too many possible character combinations. 周 zhōu is a very common surname. (Unless is this a famous name and I'm just a dumbass? Lmao)
As for pronunciation, the closest English equivalent to "zhou" would be "Joe" haha
"yu" is a singular vowel sound that does not exist in English. It's the vowel /y/ in the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA). "ze" is also not pronounced the way you would expect and is a harder "z" than what we produce in English and the vowel is more like "uh."
(This is of course ignoring tones, which is a whole different thing)
I guess if you're gonna pronounce it with English sounds, the closest we could get would sound like "Joe You Zuh" lmao even writing it sounds dumb to me. If you want to pronounce it accurately you would need to watch some videos on Mandarin pronunciation.
I would recommend these pinyin breakdown videos by Yoyo Chinese.
As for writing the characters, that's a WHOLE 'nother ballgame, friend. It takes literally months of studying to understand Chinese stroke order. But here is a video on the stroke order for 周 Zhōu specifically, to give you a taste of how to write it.
Hope this was helpful! If you know the characters for the person's name, I'd be more than happy to break it down further :P
hey liu! do you have any recommendations for learning stroke order in writing characters?
hi!
i’ve got a couple resources that you might find useful. first is this handy infographic with the 10 basic rules of stroke order:
i’ve also got a couple websites you can look at for animated gifs of stroke order:
strokeorder.info is a website i found just today, and it seems pretty great. you can type a character in and it will show you a gif of how to write it, as well as the pinyin, definition, related characters, and words that contain that character. it seems to be a great resource and really easy to use!
mdbg is an online dictionary that also provides gifs of stroke order, though they’re a little hard to find. so, how do you get to the stroke order gifs? first, search a character/word. then, click on the character in the result list. a more detailed definition will open up below the character you clicked. in this section, you’ll see a double arrow kinda like this 》. click on it, and then click on the little brush icon. this will bring up a stroke order gif for that character.
hopefully these resources can help you get the hang of stroke order. the most helpful thing when learning stroke order imo is to practice writing characters multiple times while paying close attention to the stroke order. the more practice you get, the more natural stroke order will feel
let me know if you’ve got any other questions! 加油！
Is there’s a stroke order for the way you’re supposed to write Chinese characters? And is there anywhere to find out about it/read up on?
when doing chinese characters, i find that making the straight lines slightly curved or diagonal helps make the character look better. if you want anything else, just let me know !
Chinese-English Dictionary. Includes Simplified Characters, Traditional Characters, Pinyin, and Stroke-Order. Search using English, Mandarin Chinese, or Pinyin.
WoW can I say I love this dictionary!
Shows everything: pinyin and tones, different definitions depending on the tone, other words with that character, and mostly stroke order!!!
