Yesterday I showed an educated Japanese woman Skritter. She told me she was studying Chinese so I let her try the app on my iTouch. She made so many mistakes that Skritter couldn't even recognize what she was trying to write. At first I thought there might have been a problem with Skritter, but then I flawlessly wrote a few characters from memory before it dawned on me that she didn't know the proper stroke order. It was insightful: I knew the stroke order better than she did.

What's funny, at least to me, is that I can't even read Japanese or Chinese! Skritter has endowed me with unconscious competence in low-level Chinese abilities but I am unequipped to handle routine tasks a child could perform.

I have noticed a similar thing with fluent Chinese writers, they have developed a method of writing on phones where what they write is unrecognisable as the character but a phone can decipher what it should be. When my girlfriend tried skritter she struggled because she has learnt faster simpler ways of writing which usually involve a single stroke. I guess this is just like text speak for English or really scruffy, fast handwriting. That's why I like practicing on pleco as well because it gives you a more realistic way of writing but also unfortunately encourages laziness and mistakes.

We were discussing this in Chinese class this week. Apparently a lot of German schoolchildren won't learn the right stroke order in their Chinese classes, and the same goes for universities here. The teacher, who is from Beijing and teaches some hours at local schools plus our evening class, doesn't really mind. She said, 'We even have left-handed children'. When I said there must be left-handed people in China too, she said they are trained out of it (and I see from internet searches that that's true - left-handedness is seen as weird in China).

But this confirms my feeling that stroke order isn't just important when you're using a brush. It probably affects my HWR lookups in Pleco too.

Thanks, malaili, that's interesting. I'll have to tell my Chinese teacher she's wrong!

left handed? right handed?

here's how things are done in Handan:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-20697278

:)