Stroke Order - 凄 (in すごい) - Please help!

[Duality]

Hi folks,

For whatever reason I've been totally unable to find the stroke order for this kanji using my usual sources and it's driving me up the wall.

I'm learning to guess the actual stroke order from 'rules', but this one is just so confusing and complex I can't figure it out.

Can anyone help? Here's a link to it on an online dictionary if that helps.

http://tangorin.com/kanji/凄

[Belton]

You might be interested in this font
http://www.shiawase.co.uk/2007/06/18/ka ... rder-font/

You'll find 凄 in there.

すごい　I believe is usually in kana by the way.

[Duality]

Thankyou Belton, I appreciate it. That font worked, I was expecting it not to because I'm on a Mac but it seems ok!

I'm surprised to hear Sugoi is normally written with kana though... Why am I learning the Kanji for it then!? Ack!

Just for future reference, is there a way to tell which words are generally written with our without the kanji outside of just reading in general? (Which is hard for me at the moment).

[Jessi]

Yes, in general reading is the best way to get a feel for when kanji are/aren't used, but if it's hard for you like you said, I thought of something else that might work:

Try putting both variations, with kanji and without kanji, into a Japanese search engine (Japanese version of Google works) and see which one gets more hits. I tried it with 凄い and すごい and came up with 17,2000,000 versus 32,800,000 hits, which tells me that the kana version is used a lot more If the numbers are about even then I'd say that it's fine to use either one (for example, the numbers for 美味しい and おいしい are pretty close) . I'm not sure if it'll work every time, but in theory it should!

[Belton]

Ultimately it's up to whoever is writing as to whether kana or kanji are used.

Edict gives guidance on whether kana is usually used or not by marking it (uk).
JEDict on the mac is a good off-line reader for those dictionaries. If you pay the shareware fee it will also read eijiro and waeiji etc. if you can get hold of them.
waeiji just points you at the kana entries in these cases.
www.eijiro.jp
www.jedict.com

The built-in dictionaries and reader in OSX 10.5 are excellent.
You'll have to enable the Japanese dictionaries in preferences on an English system.
They don't give direct usage advice but you can see in the examples how a word is commonly written.

[Duality]

Thanks guys, seriously that's some really, really helpful information. Reading will get easier for me as I learn more about the Japanese grammar system and get additional words under my belt.

In the mean time, I'll check out those OSX applications, Edict and Google. I actually have the Gengo Talking Japanese Dictionary too, but so far I haven't been able to determine the 'most used form' of words from it.