Stroke order refers to the order in which strokes appear when writing Chinese characters. The stroke order rules of Chinese characters are horizontal before vertical (such as "stem"), left before pressure (such as "eight"), top-down (such as "main"), left and right (such as "forest"), advanced after collection (such as "field") and front two sides in the middle (such as "water"). There are differences between the traditional stroke order of Chinese characters and the standard stroke order in different regions. Chinese mainland's stroke order standard is the stroke order standard of commonly used words in modern Chinese.
At present, the governments of Chinese mainland, Taiwan Province Province and Japan all have a set of stroke order standards for school teaching. The rules of stroke order followed by these standards are basically the same, but there are also differences, which are not completely consistent with the traditional stroke order. These standards are different from the traditional stroke order because of the needs of school teaching. If the stroke order is too complicated, or there are too many typos, students may be at a loss.
Traditional stroke order:
The traditional stroke order, which was widely used in ancient times, is still used in the cultural circle of Chinese characters today. Users are mainly scholars who understand calligraphy, so it is also called calligraphy stroke order. By studying the calligraphy works before the Republic of China, especially the works of famous calligraphers, we can draw the conclusion that the order of strokes has been recognized. Most of these strokes follow etymology, glyph structure, glyph changes or ancient methods. Many words have many variants (that is, many ways of writing). The stroke order can change with the change of font seal, official script, truth, line and grass.
On March 25th, 1988, the State Language Commission and the Press and Publication Administration jointly issued the List of Modern Chinese Common Characters, which determined the standard stroke order of 7,000 Chinese characters. The Standard of Stroke Order of Commonly Used Characters in Modern Chinese is formed on the basis of the List of Commonly Used Characters in Modern Chinese. It changes the implied standard stroke order into a clear stroke order and lists three forms of stroke order.