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Stroke order (Chinese: 筆順 ''bǐshùn''; Japanese: 筆順 ''hitsujun'' or 書き順 ''kaki-jun'') refers to the way in which Chinese Character s are written. The stroke order of a character gives the order and direction in which the brush strokes, or simply "strokes", are written. Chinese characters are used in various forms in modern Chinese Language s, Japanese , and, in South Korea , for Korean . They are known as '' Hànzì '' in Mandarin , '' Kanji '' in Japanese, and '' Hanja '' or ''hanmun'' in Korean. Chinese characters are believed to have originally been brush-written on perishable materials such as bamboo or wood slats, which could then be bound together like Venetian blinds, and rolled for storage. Examples of such books have been found dating to the late Zhou dynasty. It is a common misconception that Chinese characters were originally carved; this stems from the fact that the earliest extant examples are in carved form on the so-called Oracle Bones , Scapulomancy fortune-telling devices dating to the Shang dynasty. The oracle bones were animal bones, generally turtle shells and the scapulae of oxen and other animals, into which pits were dug. These pits were heated to produce cracks which were read by diviners, and the date, diviner's name, topics divined, and sometimes answers were then written on and carved into the bones (see image). However, these were merely one of several concurrent media to which characters were applied, and it is only the carved, harder materials which survived. The use of scapulomancy gradually gave way to other forms of divination. By the late Zhou dynasty, surviving examples of writing on Bamboo , Silk and finally Paper appear. Although it would take over a thousand years for uniform, defined forms for each character to appear, now, as then, characters comprise a number of strokes which must be written in a prescribed order. A stroke is a single movement of the writing instrument, in modern times most commonly a Pen , Pencil , or Writing Brush . Stroke order can therefore refer to the numerical order in which strokes are written, or to the direction in which the writing instrument (brush, pen, or pencil) must move in writing a particular stroke. The precise number of Chinese characters in existence is disputed. The Japanese "Daikanwa Jiten", a modern comprehensive dictionary of Chinese characters, includes fifty thousand, and more recently published Chinese dictionaries have included more than eighty thousand, although whether these are all unique characters or merely obscure variant forms is debated. Regardless of the total number, literacy in Chinese requires knowledge of three to five thousand characters, and Japanese two to three thousand characters. The number of strokes per character for most characters is between one and thirty, but the number of strokes in some obscure characters can reach as much as seventy. In the twentieth century, drastic Simplification Of Chinese Characters took place in mainland China, greatly reducing the number of strokes in each character, and a similar but more moderate simplification also took place in Japan. However, the basic rules of stroke order remained the same. Taiwan continues to use the unsimplified forms, often called traditional or regular forms. DEVELOPMENT OF STROKE ORDER RULES The rules for stroke order evolved to facilitate Vertical Writing , to maximize ease of writing and reading, to aid in producing uniform characters, and — since a person who has learned the rules can infer the stroke order of most characters — to ease the process of learning to write. They were also influenced by the highly stylized so-called Grass Script style, in which each Chinese character is written as a continuous brush stroke. In this style of writing, stroke order is all-important, since a variant of the stroke order creates a completely different visual representation. The present-day rules for stroke order were developed from those used for writing in this so-called "grass script". While children must learn and use correct stroke order in school, adults may ignore or forget the normalised stroke order for certain characters, or develop idiosyncratic ways of writing. While this is rarely a problem in day-to-day writing, in Calligraphy , stroke order is vital; incorrectly ordered or written strokes can produce a visually unappealing or, occasionally, incorrect character. The Eight Principles Of Yong (永字八法 Pinyin : ''yǒngzì bā fǎ''; Japanese: ''eiji happō''; Korean: 영자팔법, ''yeongjapalbeop'', ''yŏngjap'albŏp) uses the single character 永, meaning "eternity", to teach the eight most basic strokes. STROKE ORDER RULES 1. Write from left to right, and from top to bottom. As a general rule, characters are written from left to right, and from top to bottom. For example, among the first characters usually learned is the word "one," which is written with a single horizontal line: 一. This character has one stroke which is written from left to right (see image). The character for "two" has two strokes: 二. In this case, both are written from left to right, but the top stroke is written first. The character for "three" has three strokes: 三. Each stroke is written from left to right, starting with the uppermost stroke. This rule applies also to more complex characters. For example, 校 can be divided into two. The entire left side (木) is written before the right side (交). There are some exceptions to this rule, mainly occurring when the right side of a character has a lower enclosure (see below), for example 誕 and 健. In this case, the left side is written first, followed by the right side, and finally the lower enclosure. When there are upper and lower components, the upper components are written first, then the lower components, as in 品 and 襲. 2. Horizontal lines are written from left to right; vertical lines are written from top to bottom 3. Horizontal before vertical When strokes cross, horizontal strokes are usually written before vertical strokes: the character for "ten," 十, has two strokes written as follows: 一 → 十. | ||
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