I know that at least in written English, there’s a more or less “standardized” way to teach writing the alphabet, and I can understand that idea for individual “letters”, so to speak, but once the alphabet is learned, almost everyone finds or develops their own way of writing each letter or number or punctuation mark through habit or idiosyncrasies.
But why is it that seemingly for languages like Chinese the sequence in which the lines are written/drawn for characters/words is so much more important? Doesn’t it still ultimately mean the same thing regardless of the sequence? Or am I just accustomed to seeing “guides” and videos about how they “should” be written but it isn’t that important?
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Also consider how these stroke orders reflect the way they were written historically. Traditionally, Chinese characters were written with the right hand, going downwards, and with the left hand unravelling the scroll. The stroke order was developed to facilitate this specific limitation. The strokes are meant to flow into each other in a way that the writer would not smudge the paper.
While languages like English have more individual differences in writing, our strokes are similar in function. Writing with a pen is easier when the pen (originally a quill, but same applies to modern pens) is pulled down towards the writer, and more difficult to push up the page. Most writers write “I” by going down, not up.
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