The Complete Guide to Japanese Kanji. Kenneth G. Henshall
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General Principles of Stroke Order
Though there are inevitably a number of exceptions, most characters are written according to established principles of stroke order. A knowledge of these principles is important in order to achieve the proper shape and to write in the cursive style or semi-cursive style, in which normally separate strokes flow into one another. The basic principles listed below were issued by the Ministry of Education in 1958, and are considered the most authoritative. The guidelines apply either to individual strokes or to the arrangement of component elements, as the case may be. The first two are especially important.
1. Top to bottom.
three 25
word 118
guest 270
2. Left to right.
province 320
faction 965
example 635
3. Horizontal strokes usually precede vertical strokes when crossing.
ten 35
earth 64
till 699
4. However, in a few cases vertical strokes precede horizontal ones.
king 5
field 63
bend 279
5. Centre usually precedes right and left where the latter do not exceed two strokes each.
small 38
water 42
receive 736
Note the two exceptions are the heart radical and fire
6. Outer frame first, but bottom line last.
country 136
sun 66
moon 18
Note the order of with the left-hand stroke joined to the bottom (e.g. ).
7. Right-to-left diagonal stroke precedes left-to-right.
person 41
father 216
again 2003
8. Central vertical line last.
middle 59
vehicle 33
thing 309
9. Strokes which cut through come last.
woman 37
child 27
boat 1450
Note that the only exception is
The following pointers should also be observed.
a. squares are written with three strokes not four
b. vertical strokes should not slope, (e.g. not )
c. horizontal strokes may slope, but should be parallel (e.g. )
d. characters should be of uniform size.
Editorial and Typographical Matters; Romanization
As indicated in 7.2 in the Introduction, for each character entry we show in the top left corner of the frame its number in the sequence of the corpus of 2,136. Directly underneath we give a number from L1 to L5, which indicates the level of the Japanese Proficiency Test (JLPT)—level 5 being the lowest, and level 1 being the highest. Unfortunately there seems to be some difficulty in obtaining full data on these levels, and we have been obliged to make our own estimates in some cases. On the right-hand side of the sequence number and the JLPT level, we give the character.