There's a stroke-by-stroke way to write every Chinese character. Here's how I got used to hànzì and kanji stroke orders, and why even then they still threw a few punches.

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** Past viewers have objected to my use of historical gotchas and exceptions. If that's you, 02:49 is the perfect place to end the story. (You'll see me go from "too hard" to "too easy"!) Maybe skip to 04:52 to see the punching Hànzì. **

Forgive the mismatched audio. I rerecorded the intro.

Learning kanji and hànzì means writing the right strokes in the right order. As if there weren't enough to pay attention to...

At first, this seemed like the last straw. The moment I fully realized this was utterly unlike other writing systems.

Fortunately, there were real patterns here! Patterns you can get good mileage out of!

Even then, some characters still threw me for a loop. Like the different stroke orders between China and Japan. Or patterns that worked for one character but shifted when that character was part of a larger character. Or the first time I saw someone write cursive characters.

It's a fun skill.

~ Credits ~

Art and animation by Josh from NativLang

Music by Kevin MacLeod:
Path of the Goblin King v2, Sneaky Snooper - (incompetech.com)
Music by me:
Upbeat Thoughts, Oowah - (soundcloud.com/Botmasher)

General image, font, sfx and sources credits:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Hq4IgROtgkdQQGeBB70OHcKnPKt5Zo3tR8F_oNNs-AQ/