#stroke order

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!