Stroke order

Since stroke order also aids learning and memorization, students are often taught about it from a very early age in schools and encouraged to follow them.

The Eight Principles of Yong uses the single character 永 ('eternity') to teach eight of the most basic strokes in regular script.

In ancient China, the Oracle bone script carved on ox scapula and tortoise plastrons showed no indication of stroke order.

During the divination ceremony, after the cracks were made, the characters were written with a brush on the shell or bone (to be carved in a workshop later).

[1] For those characters (the vast majority) which were later engraved into the hard surface using a knife, perhaps by a separate individual, there is evidence (from incompletely engraved pieces) that in at least some cases all the strokes running one way were carved, then the piece was turned, and strokes running another way were then carved.

However, stroke order could still not yet be ascertained from the steles, and no paper from that time is extant.

The true starting point of stroke order is the clerical script which is more regularized, and in some ways similar to modern text.

The stroke order 1000 years ago was similar to that toward the end of Imperial China.

[3] However, the stroke orders implied by the Kangxi dictionary are not necessarily similar to nowadays' norm.

The modern governments of mainland China, Hong Kong,[4] Taiwan,[5] and Japan[6] have standardized official stroke orders to be taught in schools.

The various official stroke orders agree on the vast majority of characters, but each has its differences.

For example, among the first characters usually learned is the number one, which is written with a single horizontal line: 一.

Stroke order is often described in person by writing characters on paper or in the air.