I’m a learner of Japanese for now some years, and I really like kanji, or chinese characters, and I’ve recently taken some interest in the Chinese language though I don’t intend to learn it.
My wonder is about the characters dictionaries (be it for foreigners or native speakers) and the stroke order of characters. While for Japanese most of the characters dictionaries have stroke orders diagrams, I can’t seem to find such feature in chinese characters dictionaries, but I’ve looked only at a few. Of course there are lots of websites that give the stroke order of individual characters, but I wonder if there is some kind of reference book (you can find a lot of 漢和辞典, or reference kanji books for foreigners for Japanese)
I get the feeling that, Chinese stroke order is based on a set of rules which you apply to every character you want to write, but in Japanese the stroke order seems more regulated on individual characters. That would explains why there is a lot of differences in the way you write a single characters in both langages (like 必 or 凸 or even 田) and why, actually, the Chinese way looks more ... logical to me, kind of. (Look at: 左 and 右: in Japanese, for the first one, you write the horizontal stroke first, but for the second one, it’s the vertical/going left down stroke first! In Chinese, there seems to be no differences: that would be just following a general rule, while in Japanese you differentiate both)
Maybe also, because Japanese actually imported the characters, the way you write individual characters needed to be more regulated?
Where I live, in France, in most Japanese universities classes, we have a book for official jōyō kanji and the way you write individual characters. But in Chinese classes, they have a character dictionary, they learn in classes the rules of writing, but there’s just the printed characters in their dictionary (with pinyin and other info) and no 筆順 like you see in a Japanese dictionary. (don’t know the name of the book, and I’m less knowledgable in Chinese, but I think it’s a pretty authoritative reference book)
I am so curious about this. Do you get the feeling that stroke order in Japanese is more « fixed », do you know about a character book (for adults) that precises the exact way you write each character under its entry? I feel like in Chinese, people tend to say that stroke order matters as a general rule of writing, not individually. In my Japanese classes, stroke order for each character is very very important and won’t you mistake 右 and 左 in the kanji exam