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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In Chinese, there’s no alphabet. So how do you organize a dictionary? You might think you could go by sound and invent a pseudo alphabetical order, but Chinese dialects have different sounds, even though they use the same characters.
The answer: organize by stroke order. If you want to be able to find anything in a dictionary, you need to be quite strict in following the stroke order and you need to standardize as well as enforce the standards in education.
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