basic knowledge of kanji stroke order. Please reply.

[Shumiston]

There is this game I'm going to buy for the DS rather than an electronic dictionary (I am 14. I don't have the money for one).
I read some reviews for it and it is excellent for english people who are learning Japanese (it isn't all in Japanese). There is one thing it said in a review. BASIC KNOWLEDGE OF KANJI STROKE ORDER REQUIRED. So I was wondering if any of you could help me get some "basic knowledge of kanji stroke order". Any tips will help.

[jemstone]

most of the strokes are top-down, left-to-right, direction.

for diagonal lines and curves, the general guide is that "top-down" precedes "left-to-right". so if you imagine there's a curve line starting from the top right and extends downwards to the bottom left, you would be starting from the top right going down to the bottom left, thus top-down overrules left-to-right.

i'm sure there are exceptions out there that does not follow these general guides, however i think these general guides cover quite a bit.

[Shumiston]

わかちましたありがとございます！

[watermen]

There is this game I'm going to buy for the DS rather than an electronic dictionary (I am 14. I don't have the money for one).
I read some reviews for it and it is excellent for english people who are learning Japanese (it isn't all in Japanese). There is one thing it said in a review. BASIC KNOWLEDGE OF KANJI STROKE ORDER REQUIRED. So I was wondering if any of you could help me get some "basic knowledge of kanji stroke order". Any tips will help.

Nowadays, you don't really need to write Japanese, just use IME and you will be fine.

[Jason]

There is this game I'm going to buy for the DS rather than an electronic dictionary (I am 14. I don't have the money for one).
I read some reviews for it and it is excellent for english people who are learning Japanese (it isn't all in Japanese). There is one thing it said in a review. BASIC KNOWLEDGE OF KANJI STROKE ORDER REQUIRED. So I was wondering if any of you could help me get some "basic knowledge of kanji stroke order". Any tips will help.

Nowadays, you don't really need to write Japanese, just use IME and you will be fine.

That's probably true if you're not in Japan for any length of time. Otherwise, I'd say at some point you'll find youself up a creek without a paddle.

On a more philosophical type side, one could argue that writing is very much a part of literacy, and you really can't be considered literate if you don't know how to write the language too. You wouldn't expect English learners to not learn how to write English, would you?

Also, writing with characters completely different from your native ones can be fun.

[Belton]

Wikipedia has an illustrated article on stroke order
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stroke_order

That said, I found the character recognition on the DS dictionary very forgiving. (IMO)
It seems to look at the whole character rather than using stroke order and direction for recognition like other systems.

[Fedgrub]

What game are you thinking about getting dude?