Chinese: NOOOOOO you can't change the order of the strokes! Now your character is 100% unrecognisable even though it looks just like the computer version!
I don’t think anyone can actually tell; it’s just “the proper way of writing”. It’s like how English speakers would find it weird to put the alphabet in a different order, even though it’s basically random.
In print this is not as big of a deal because, but it becomes quite obvious in cursive handwriting or any handwriting where strokes start to connect (and there is an expectation that they connect a certain way because stroke order is always adhered to). In running scripts stroke order can definitely affect character recognizability, the same as if you were writing an English word in cursive, but started at the last letter and back-tracked to the others in some random order.
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u/wynntari Starter of "vowels are glottal trills" Dec 23 '22
Chinese: NOOOOOO you can't change the order of the strokes! Now your character is 100% unrecognisable even though it looks just like the computer version!