If you have ever learned Chinese in a classroom setting you have almost certainly come into contact with the seemingly arbitrary and ridiculous rules of stroke order. If you were particularly unlucky, your teacher was a stickler for the rules and corrected you every time you wrote on the board.Here at Skritter we try not to shake our finger too much at your stroke order mistakes, but we do try to be as precise as possible so that we're teaching best stroke order practices. After all, we've taught people more than 1,000,000 characters and it would be no good if we were inculcating mistakes!
The good news is that there has been a great deal of research done on the topic of stroke order and most characters have unambiguous orders. The bad news is that as with any language spoken by 1/5 of the world's population, there are inconsistencies. There is the mainland Chinese standard, the Taiwanese Ministry of Education, the Japanese government's kanji guidelines, and dozens of dictionaries all claiming to have "authoritative" stroke order guides.
In this morass of inconsistency, we at Skritter are making an honest effort to consult all the sources and be flexible whenever possible. Since the site started I have kept a text buffer with my research in it and every time someone asked about a radical or character, I went to that document, double checked any out of date sources, and responded. Recently Nick suggested that I translate that body of research into a page on the site so that our decisions on stroke order were collected in one spot and were transparent to anyone interested in the topic.
Well, it took quite a few hours to codify and fact-check my rather ill-maintained document, but it is now available for public viewing here. If you have a passion for stroke order, I recommend you stop by and check it out. I've spent many hours fact-checking sources for stroke order inconsistencies on the web and have never run across a document like this. Basically I've listed every contentious radical or stroke we've dealt with, outlined what the sources say, and then summarized our decision about how best to support that particular case. If you ever wondered why Skritter insisted on a certain stroke before another, this document should explain it.
The other benefit of putting all my research in one spot is that you can criticize me and hopefully improve the accuracy of the Skritter character database. So by all mean, check it out and yell at me if you find something incorrect!
Also, the Skritter November newsletter just went out.
