Chinese character stroke order

Learning Chinese characters is perhaps the most difficult aspect of studying Mandarin. It's not just a matter of memorizing what a character looks like, the constituent parts (known as radicals), or the etymology. There is also a fairly precise "stroke order" that governs writing. It can be very frustrating for Western students.

I was reminded of this as my young daughter attempts to learn some traditional Chinese characters, which are used in Taiwan, Hong Kong, and some overseas Chinese communities (China uses simplified characters, see my essay here for a quick history). Her inclination is to write the characters any way she pleases -- much like I did when I started studying Mandarin many years ago -- but my wife and I had to correct her. The general stroke order is top to bottom, left to right, but there are some exceptions. We weren't helped by a cheap Taiwanese children's character booklet which had the incorrect stroke order for several basic characters -- for instance, the instructions for xiao (小, small) had her starting with the left dian instead of the central stroke. I am hardly an expert on characters, but it still seemed strange to me. When my wife saw it, she was puzzled, too. "That's not the way we learned it," she frowned.

She was right. I found a great online resource, the YellowBridge Online Character Dictionary, which has a very useful lookup function and animated character tool which shows the proper stroke order. It backed up my wife in almost every case. Still, as she tried it out, she was reminded that there are some alternate writing methods for certain characters, such as guo (國, country), below, which places the top right dian second to last in the stroke order, instead of near the beginning, which is how many people in Taiwan write it in order to save time.