Japanese Font with Included Stroke Order Numbers!

One of the "fun" things about learning Japanese is discovering that just as in English the various Japanese characters also have a specific set of rules which must be used when writing individual characters.  The way in which characters must be written is often called "Stroke  Order".

In English since we have primary characters consisting of 26 upper case and 26 lower case characters, the total amount of work we must do to memorise stroke orders with English characters is minimal

In the Japanese writing system there are 3 sets of characters which they must learn to write, and each different set of characters has their own distinct stoke order rules.

The 3 sets are:

Hiragana: 46 primary characters
Katakana: 46 primary characters (excluding special case characters)
Kanji: 2136 primary characters (minimum number)

Hiragana and Katakana are collectively called Kana character systems.

The number of Kana characters are not so large and so memorising their stoke orders is not very difficult

In the case of Kanji however, the situation is vastly different.  With a minimum of 2136 characters, each character having a specific stroke order, it can quickly become a very difficult task to memorise all the different Kanji and their specific stroke orders.

Thankfully, there are some shortcuts we can take to make the task a little easier.

The main shortcut being that Kanji are often constructed from small patterns of strokes which are generally written in the same way.  These repeating stoke order patterns are called Radicals.  These Radicals have a number of uses, the main one being to make memorising and writing of Kanji easier (as well as looking up Kanji in a dictionary).

With a complex Kanji, if we can break it up in to the Radicals it is constructed from then memorisation of stoke orders may be easier.

Even with the help of Radicals, learning Kanji stoke orders can still be difficult.  One solution to this problem is to get a Kanji dictionary.  Kanji dictionaries list lots of information about a specific Kanji, one of those pieces of information being the stroke orders that a particular Kanji has.

Unfortunately with there being such a large number of Kanji, these Kanji dictionaries tend to be big and bulky in paper form.

Fortunately we now live in a time when we have access to electronic computing devices which are very powerful.  As a result there are a large number of Japanese Kanji dictionaries which can be installed on your smart phone, tablet, laptop, desktop computer, tv, smart watch, (insert Internet of things device of your choice here)...

So finding a stroke order for a specific Kanji is not as difficult as it used to be.

However even with the modern technological computing power at your fingertips, if you are trying to learn to read/write in Japanese and you come across a Kana/Kanji who's stroke order you do not know this can cause problems.  Because at that point you must: stop what you are reading/writing, scamper off to your dictionary of choice, look up the Kana/Kanji you are interested in, memorise the stroke order, and then carry on with your previous activity.

The above process is somewhat time consuming and it may well break your flow of concentration.

One particular tool that is available to mitigate this issue are special display fonts which you can install on your computer or use in a web browser.  These fonts have tiny little numbers displayed next to each of a Kana/Kanji's strokes which indicate the stroke order used for a particular Kana/Kanji.  As a result if you forget the stroke order of a Kana/Kanji you can just zoom in on the Kana/Kanji and see the stroke orders.

Here is an example of one such font, and how it is displayed when zoomed in on it.

Stroke Order Font displayed for Kana and Kanji.

You can download this font using the link below.

https://sites.google.com/site/nihilistorguk/

Installation instructions vary on how to install fonts on different computer platforms, so please do a Google search for more information on the specifics of installing new fonts on your platform of choice.

Stroke order in English is generally not that important.  If the resultant English written character is neatly written and looks visually correctly formed, it really should not have any great impact on reading or writing it.  This unfortunately is not the case with Japanese writing.

Stroke orders for Japanese Kana/Kanji are extremely important, especially if it is written quickly or by hand.  As often the only way to identify a particular Kana/Kanji is by examining the stroke order.

Also if you are looking up a Kana/Kanji in an electronic dictionary, you will often find that the electronic lookup methods require you to know stroke order to reliably look up Kana/Kanji.  Even if you visually write a Kana/Kanji that is completely legible visually on a computer, without the correct stroke order the computer may be more likely to select the wrong Kana/Kanji!

A good example of this is Google's Japanese Hand Writing Keyboard or Google's GBoard with Japanese Hand Writing support enabled.  If you write with correct stroke order these hand writing keyboards are extremely accurate. In fact you can write Kana/Kanji so badly visually that even an experienced Japanese teacher may not know what you wrote, but Google's keyboard will know, because it can keep track of stroke order.  Google's keyboard will still be very good even if you don't know the correct stroke order, but you will have to be sure to write the characters more accurately in terms of shape for Google to make an accurate guess as to the Kana/Kanji you are writing.  Even then without good stroke order Google will guess wrong a lot more often.

It is worth pointing out that Google has one of the most advanced Japanese hand writing recognition systems available.  It will try extremely hard to recognise what you are writing, a lot of other Japanese hand writing recognition systems will not be so forgiving and will be highly inaccurate, if you do not use correct stroke order.

So in short, go learn stroke order.