Comments by "SmallSpoonBrigade" (@SmallSpoonBrigade) on "Stroke Order - there's a wrong way to write Chinese characters" video.

Yes, it helps greatly when it comes to writing the character efficiently. You don't need to move your pen as much between strokes as you would in the Japanese style.
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You claimed that it's impossible to tell without a magnifying glass and that people do that for the purposes of telling stroke order. You're completely full of shit. The magnifying glass has nothing to do with stroke order, it's part of a more general examination of the characters. In the vast majority of cases you can tell that they got the stroke order wrong without needing to resort to a magnifying glass.
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Marbles McGee It's definitely not impossible without the magnifying glass, it's just easier with it. Depending upon the order in which you draw the strokes and components, you'll get slightly different proportions and positioning. It's not necessarily going to be super obvious, but it will look a little bit off.
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I felt that way before I started to study them. They're all broken down into radicals and functional components or are themselves a radical or functional component. There's only about 400 of them possible that are used to create all the characters they use. It's a daunting task because you need to know hundreds of them in order to read anything at all. And thousands of them in order to read any sort of regular books. But, there's a lot less confusion and complexity in the system once you start to understand how it works. Eventually you get to the point where you can guess at meanings without knowing the character based upon what the character is made of. Obviously, you won't always be right.
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You can tell when the pen is lifted from the paper it's rarely completely straight and you tend to crowd different parts of the character if you write it one way or another. A lot of it is instinct as Simo says, but somebody using obscure words like 吾 is unlikely to do it with the wrong stroke order as you generally study for years before you learn the literary only form of I.
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Will Darling The reasons are that it's faster to develop the muscle memory to write efficiently and that if you're writing at a reasonable speed people will tell. The whole basis for "cursive" Chinese is that most people have agreed upon an order of doing the strokes, which means that when things are reduced to squiggles that it's more likely that you'll have compatible squiggles to other people.
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Marbles McGee That's ridiculous. People are not paying tons of money in order to have an expert know if something was written with the correct stroke order. They're looking at the characters with magnifying glasses for other reasons, not to determine the stroke order that somebody used when writing.
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Marbles McGee Your well-reasoned argument has convinced me. Not really, but it's clear that you've got no idea what you're talking about, so I'd rather not waste any more of my time on an incompetent jackass.
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Marbles McGee You're the one that made the assertion, you prove it. But, considering that you're full of shit, I don't think you can.
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Will Darling That's a really, really bad example. The only thing preventing a printer from printing a perfectly legible character by placing dots in a random order is that it would be extremely hard on the machine, the printer knows where each stroke should start and end and as a result, you don't wind up with crowding and improperly spaced characters. What's more, printers don't know anything about order, they just print the things from left to right and top to bottom regardless of how the information would be written. Same goes for languages like Arabic that are written right to left, the printer prints those lines backwards.
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Will Darling I get the point, it's just that the point I was responding to is shit. When it comes to printing, the whole idea of order is meaningless as a printer isn't making strokes, it's making a series of dots on the paper that people interpret as strokes. They'd see the same character no matter how the printer puts the marks onto the page as the locations are hardcoded based upon the font the printer is using. As far as the other bits go, stroke order is important, and you can generally tell when people are getting it wrong because they're character doesn't look right. If they're engaged in running script the character they write will be completely incomprehensible in many cases as they won't have the correct squiggles.
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Will Darling It's not an excellent tool, it's a method of creating characters that doesn't address the question of what is and isn't the right way of righting a character. A printer doesn't write characters, it prints them. And it doesn't even print them, it prints a series of dots that we construe as being characters, they could just as easily be anything else as the printer doesn't know. Well, modern printers don't, some older printers would. Any order isn't right, that's very, very wrong as you're not going to be able look words up in the dictionary, and you'll waste a huge amount of time trying to learn to make individual characters look right when you could just use the stroke order that everybody else does and be 9/10 of the way there on your first attempt at writing a character.
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+Will Darling, it's hardly my fault that you don't know what you're talking about. I've already enumerated why you're wrong, but since you're kind of thick, I'll do it again. You can't look up characters in a Chinese dictionary, if you have the stroke wrong, you'll have to learn to write each character so that you can trick the people reading, your running script will never be legible to other people, you'll have a much harder time developing the muscle memory to write effectively and people will know that you're an outsider. Yes, with tons of practice, you might be able to slowly write in a way that people won't know you're doing it wrong, but that's a huge waste of time and energy when the rules are pretty straightforward in most cases. Yes, there are a few characters that violate the normal rules, but most of them follow them in an easy to comprehend way. The Chinese and Japanese do a fair number of things that are inscrutable to outsiders, but this isn't one of those things. They write the way they do because it's generally the best way of doing, just because you think you know better than they do, doesn't make it so.
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+Will Darling, I didn't misinterpret that at all. In no sense does your conclusion follow from that premise. Neither in the literal sense nor in the metaphorical sense does that back the notion that the stroke order doesn't matter. Reading more isn't the problem, the problem here is that your conclusion doesn't follow from your premise. No matter how much reading one does, if the premise doesn't lead to a conclusion it's not going to get any better.
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Will Darling No, I have issues with you not understanding what you're talking about and then trying to play it off like I'm wrong. There are reasons why those strokes are written in the order that they're written. If you want to do it wrongly, that's really your own business, you're the one that's going to suffer, not me. There's enough bad information about these characters on the internet as it is, do the people who want to learn a favor and stop spreading misinformation. You can get away with writing the characters in the wrong way for a short time, but if you want to have any hope of reaching literacy and having people be able to read what you've written, you're pretty much stuck writing them in the right order.
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