In a couple of my recent classes I have been writing some kanji on the whiteboard to illustrate how to remember the days of the week in English. My students are at the age now where they are just starting to study how to write kanji in school. They freaked out the first time I wrote some kanji on the board.
When I first learned to write in Japanese, my teacher was really strict about what order you write each stroke of the kanji with your pencil or pen. I remember her saying that the order of the strokes is preserved in history because they can tell from carvings on ancient weapons from thousands of years ago.
My personal feeling is that as long as the end result is the same, what does it matter how you do it? While that philosophy might not fly in politics and government it certainly seems fine for writing the alphabet.
Anyway, my students are spending lots of time at school every day doing the order just the right way, and that makes them ideal critics for my haphazard writing style. Their criticism also extends to numbers and the alphabet. It’s good for them to see that it is OK for someone to write in a different way, but they are always astonished to see someone flout conventional wisdom like I do.
A while back while playing Brain Training on the Nintendo DS I noticed that the handwriting recognition software wouldn’t recognize how I wrote the number “5”. Apparently, everyone in Japan writes it the same way – the whole bottom section first, and then one horizontal line across the top. I had to change how I write the number to be able to use the software. I wonder if the American version of the software is the same?
