母 stroke order irregular compared to 日


As I have learned kanji, I have been under the impressions stroke order for
_box_ kanji like 日 should be left to right, top to bottom. Most kanji seem
very consistent, or so I thought.

I recently discovered I have been writing 母 like I would 日、whereas it should
be instead the first stroke is the left and bottom combined. Is either method
technically correct? Or what rule will help predict this irregular stroke
order?




Some characters indeed have tricky stroke orders even for native speakers
(writers?), for instance, [左 is started from the horizontal line but 右 is from
the slanted one](https://japanese.stackexchange.com/q/204/78), and so on. But
in your case, it seems to be a simple misunderstanding.

I don't know which font you use to browse this site, but typically, 母 and 日
would look like in the image below, respectively.

![enter image description here](https://i.stack.imgur.com/AFVip.png)  
(generated [here](http://www.wa-k.info/kanji/))

Note that 母 has two lines crossed at its bottom-right corner, which indicates
that it's different than what you called "box" structure such as 日. Each
writing system obviously has its own crucial points of recognition however
they look tiny to you, as (if I assume you only read Latin alphabets) in
Cyrillic alphabet _**м**_ and _**т**_ differs soundly (I hope you're using a
font displays their true italic forms, but if not, please refer
[here](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Cyrillic-italics-
nonitalics.png) for what I mean), and in hiragana **わ** , **れ** and **ね**. As
well as in kanji.

Blaming etymology is, technically, kind of circular reasoning in this
discussion, because today's standard kanji shapes incorporate more or less
calligraphic or handwriting feature, that is, they're actually shaped like how
they wrote them. It's better to just think it as the same reason why we don't
write **O** like **D**.




Does the following explanation help?

The logogramme 母 is formed from 女 by adding two dots representing the
prominent breasts typical to lactating women (while 女 epitomises a woman
tempting a man.)

For the record the stroke order for 女 is indicated here ->
<http://jisho.org/search/%23kanji%20%E5%A5%B3> .

So (hopefully) you experience less difficulty in guessing the stroke order of
the "composed character" 母.

