Importance of stroke order and writing kanji


This got me confused:

Various kanji learning sites on the Internet and even books on kanji stress
the importance of stroke order while learning new kanji, saying it's highly
essential to learn to write kanji correctly. Yet the same sources say that the
act of writing kanji is slowly getting obsolete and one shouldn't worry too
much about writing the kanji while learning them;knowing the readings and
recognising them are more important.

Aren't these two statements kind of contradictory; stressing that learn stroke
order while learning kanji, and also saying knowing to write them is not
something to be worried when learning them?




The stroke order matters mostly in relation to handwriting. Although writing
may be not the most prevalent way over typing nowadays, recent rise of touch
devices allows people to easily input characters by handwriting again. It lets
you look up kanji you don't know whose reading; and to my experience, those
recognition engines are trained with people's normal stroke order, while would
be less accurate when written in untypical order.

The importance of stroke order in the discussion of handwriting is more like
that of the common sense. People may say the order is not that strict (and
it's not always unique actually), but for example you don't write capital A
from its horizontal bar. Since the previously written strokes rein in the
layout of following strokes, character produced in unusual order may look
unnatural aside from good or bad. Thankfully [learning the stroke order is
rule-based](https://www.tofugu.com/japanese/kanji-stroke-order/) rather than
memorizing the same number of definitions as kanji.




The stroke order matters mostly in relation to handwriting. Although writing
may be not the most prevalent way over typing nowadays, recent rise of touch
devices allows people to easily input characters by handwriting again. It lets
you look up kanji you don't know whose reading; and to my experience, those
recognition engines are trained with people's normal stroke order, while would
be less accurate when written in untypical order.

The importance of stroke order in the discussion of handwriting is more like
that of the common sense. People may say the order is not that strict (and
it's not always unique actually), but for example you don't write capital A
from its horizontal bar. Since the previously written strokes rein in the
layout of following strokes, character produced in unusual order may look
unnatural aside from good or bad. Thankfully [learning the stroke order is
rule-based](https://www.tofugu.com/japanese/kanji-stroke-order/) rather than
memorizing the same number of definitions as kanji.

