One might phrase this "Stroke order is assigned by convention in Japanese; deviating from the conventional order is incorrect, much laik hau Einglish speling iz nat ap four eendevizyuelle tyoise." ("What's the matter? You can sound it out. Pfft, Americans, such rigid traditionalists. It makes sense in the context of their religious views and conservative political tendencies, though." [+])

This avoids unfortunate Man Japanese People They're So Craaaaazy overtones. (FWIW: stroke order is prescriptionist not descriptionist but AFAIK prescriptionism has a virtually hegemonic mindshare among relevant authorities.)

n.b. Otherwise this project and post is freaking excellent.

[+] You can actually read Japanese-language takes on American culture which are exactly as bad as this Orientialism-in-reverse.

To someone looking at characters for the first time, it's not obvious that the stroke order matters to the reader as spelling does in English. It's not about fetishization of the process over stroke order, it's really obvious to the reader if you wrote the character incorrectly.

or see: お

the last 'dash' in the top right is a retouching of the paper after the curl on the bottom right. Imagine a swirl that starts in top middle, swings around on the bottom left, swings around on the bottom right, lifts off the paper, and then touches back down briefly in the top right. If you're hand-writing, that little landing dot can be huge, tiny, or even conjoined, but to be legible it's generally visually a continuation of the lower stroke. If you just copied the letter without any concept of stroke, it would be difficult to read because you'd be looking for that swirl. Imagine the dot on a lowercase 'i' - it's supposed to be directly above the stroke for your brain to render it as an 'i' vs an 'l'. It's why when written out you can distinguish 'il' and lt' even though they're quite similar if drawn literally, quickly.

An example of stroke order vs stroke direction is more apparent when you need good proportions. Kanji like 風 or 看 are really hard to 'draw' with good square proportions if you don't stroke them in a particular order. Kind of like trying to draw a face by starting with the nostrils, then doing the eyebrows, and ending with the outline of the face - it's tough.

Interestingly, the Japanese hiragana letters are really designed to be written with a brush from top to bottom. The letters flow from one to the next really nicely when written from top to bottom, and are actually much harder to write properly when written left to right. See: す - き - の. They're much more natural to write top to bottom, and keep going down rather than from a left to right (which is also indicated by stroke order - the horizontal bars on the letters above are written before the downstrokes).

I also don't buy Emmett's claim. There are regional differences in stroke order, even for hanzi. Japanese people use a different stroke order for kanji than mainland Chinese people use for hanzi, which again is different than the stroke order used by people in Taiwan and Hong Kong. The differences implied by these things are smaller than the differences in CJK fonts, which have no inherent "order" at all, yet people somehow manage to read.

Stroke order matters for calligraphy and memorization and dictionaries, but as patio11 says, it's largely just prescriptive. Spelling is prescriptive, too: it's historically and/or conventionally derived, but knowing the rules makes learning words easier, and you certainly can't use a dictionary without it.

The hard and fast rules are prescriptive, but once you start writing, you realize that some of that prescription ends up as description. There really are detectable orthographic differences in how stroke order affects (generally, of course) how people write.

i have not met anyone who did not learn the chinese language without doing penmanship work, and so i cannot say what it means to ignore the stroke order when writing chinese. if one were to pick up the latin alphabet with an unusual stroke order and were to carry that habit to adulthood, will we find his handwriting difficult to read? if he managed to train his hands to write with a most unusual method will he still write perfectly legibly, and can we even distinguish his stroke order if we were to inspect it carefully? i don't know the answer to this. out of curiousity i wrote the alphabet with a totally unfamiliar stroke order (e.g. starting the y's and g's from the bottom) and it looked as if i wrote it with my off hand - unsteady and unpracticed - which seems to suggest that maybe with some effort it could look totally similar. i can believe that without stroke order guidance one could still achieve legible chinese writing.

It's genuinely hard to read people's writing if the stroke order is off.

If you write super slowly and deliberately it may not matter much, but in my actual real-life usage I've found that it does. If you're learning, you're definitely better off learning the standard stroke order for the area where you live.

I believe there's a reason for the rules and that you need to know them. I think patio11's metaphor is the correct one -- it's a lot like english spelling.

I doubt your last claim in the general case, and I think the GP comment in particular is taking things too far -- there's no way that the average Japanese reader is going to be able to tell the stroke order used to write ぉ (in handwriting scenarios, not calligraphy), so long as you don't mess up the form of the thing.

To answer your question, if the image doesn't show the pencil positioned on that last stroke, I'd say that the characters don't look right and may infer but cannot tell for sure that they were written using incorrect stroke orders.

But...

If hardmaru's remark about Japanese culture ("a society where the process matters just as much as the end result") is incorrect, I'd prefer to see that idea challenged for accuracy, rather than labeling it as "hegemonic".

The remark about calligraphers exploding was a joke - even in Japan/China, there's the stereotype that calligraphers are fussy perfectionists. My grandfather was a calligrapher for the Taiwanese govt for many years and he'd probably explode too, if he saw any of my Chinese handwriting.

Cultures are inherently different, and I think it's okay to point out oddities in one's culture or someone else's. hardmaru seems to have lived in Japan long enough to be credible on this matter, and I have no reason to suspect bad intentions.

But anyway, I'll bite: stroke order is in no way comparable to your examples. It's comparable to whether you start "5" with the vertical or horizontal line, or an "8" at the top or the bottom.

(Also, are there really people who start an 8 at the bottom...?)

http://jp2.r0tt.com/l_c1714080-82ad-11e1-9f79-1ff907600002.j...

...except that I draw bars for the 7's as taught in Finnish elementary school, which is clearly Wrong(tm) per the above instructions:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/7_(number)#Evolution_of_the_gl...

I love living in Japan, and everything about Japanese culture (even Japanese company culture..), sometimes I just poke a little fun at it..

The thing is that what a current net is doing is very simple. It's just extrapolating from a set on a high dimensional feature space.

There's no meaning here and so it's hard to generating a bunch of pseudo-data as art. It's fun and interesting when you do it a few times so any semi-random technique like ink blots or fractals but if you produce a steady stream of something like that, it's unoriginal, non-artistic qualities become more obvious.

https://twitter.com/hardmaru/status/676067023655337984

when written in ink by brush the order of strokes seems to follow very natural flow, yet when it is taught using pencil it looks much less natural.

Did gyre and gimble in the wabe;

All mimsy were the borogoves,

And the mome raths outgrabe.

http://blog.otoro.net/2015/12/12/handwriting-generation-demo...

That's a small word for major change in programming paradigm

"Computer, create fake chinese characters. These don't look right, stop drawing earlier. Ok, cut out all that are outside a one inch by one inch square."

One of the earliest games projects I worked on with learning AI scrapped the learning AI because it had a habit of sometimes, but rarely, causing the characters to run into the corner of a room and stay there until shot. Nobody had the slightest clue how to 'debug' the neural network to solve the intermittent issue.

It's all fun and games when things are going well. But like Jurassic Park, when it comes to paying customers, eventually there will be running, and screaming.

So yeah, but it works really well.

Here's a korean site providing many Hanja/Kanji/Hanzi stroke orders