Kanji Stroke Order: The 8 Rules That Cover Almost Everything

Why bother with stroke order in a digital age? Because it makes your writing legible, your handwriting recognition work, and — crucially — it makes kanji easier to remember, because correct order reflects the character's structure.

The 8 core rules

1. Top to bottom: write upper strokes before lower ones (三 goes top line first).
2. Left to right: write left strokes before right ones (川 left to right).
3. Horizontal before vertical when they cross (十 — horizontal, then vertical).
4. Center before wings in symmetric characters (小, 水 — middle first).
5. Outside before inside (月, 同 — the frame before the contents).
6. Close the box last: write the bottom line of an enclosure after the inside (国, 回).
7. Vertical line through the middle goes last (中, 車 — the piercing stroke last).
8. Diagonal right-to-left before left-to-right (文, 父).

Practice the rules, not 2,000 characters

You don't memorize stroke order per kanji — you internalize these rules and they apply automatically. After a few weeks of mindful writing, your hand knows where to go.

Tools that show the way

Kanji 360 animates the stroke order of every character in the dictionary, so you can watch, trace, and replay until the motion is automatic. Animated stroke order plus the rules above is the fastest path to confident handwriting.