Hiragana Stroke Order: The Characters Learners Most Often Get Wrong

Hiragana has 46 basic characters. In Japanese schools they are taught in the first two grades, and the national curriculum asks children to write “following the stroke order, paying attention to how each stroke is written and to the shape of the character” (Course of Study for Elementary Schools, 2017, in Japanese).

Adult learners usually meet hiragana in a different way. Most of us first see the characters in printed fonts, where some strokes are joined or shaped differently from handwriting, and many people learn to type kana long before they learn to write them. That is why a character can end up looking right while being written in the wrong order.

This post goes through the hiragana whose stroke order learners most often get wrong, with the correct order and the reason the mistake tends to happen. The order here is the one taught in Japanese school textbooks. If you want to see each stroke drawn in turn, our hiragana stroke-order pages (in Japanese) show all 46 characters as numbered, stroke-by-stroke diagrams. The diagrams are readable without knowing Japanese.

Characters that are easy to get wrong

せ (se)

せ has three strokes. The first is the long horizontal line. The second is the short vertical line on the right. The third is the long vertical line on the left, which turns to the right at the bottom.

The usual mistake is to swap the second and third strokes. If you write left to right, the left line feels like it should come first. Writing the short right line first lets you judge where the long left line should turn and how far it should run.

も (mo)

も has three strokes, and the first is the vertical line that curves at the bottom. The two horizontal lines come after it.

Many kanji start with horizontal strokes, so learners often draw the two horizontals first. Starting with the vertical means each horizontal is drawn across a line that is already there, which makes them easier to keep the same length.

や (ya)

や has three strokes: first the curved line that starts on the left and swings up and round to the right, then the short dot at the top, and last the long line from the upper left downward.

The long line is the most visible part of the character, so people tend to draw it first. In the correct order, you place the long line last, and you can decide exactly where it crosses the curve.

よ (yo) and ゆ (yu)

よ has two strokes. The first is the short horizontal line at the upper right. The second comes down vertically and ends in a loop. ゆ also has two strokes: first the rounded curve on the left, then the line that runs down through the middle.

In both, learners often draw the long central line first. Both characters work the other way round: the short line or the outer curve fixes the position, and the long line goes through last.

ふ (fu)

ふ has four strokes: the dot at the top, the bent line in the middle, the dot on the left, and the dot on the right.

Because the dots are often joined in quick handwriting and in some fonts, the number of strokes itself becomes unclear. The two side dots are especially easy to swap. Top first, then left, then right.

を (wo)

を has three strokes. The first is the horizontal line. The second comes down to the lower left and folds back to the right in one movement. The third is the large curve that starts on the right.

This character is used almost only as a grammatical particle, so learners write it less often than others and sometimes mix up its shape with お (o). Remembering that the second stroke folds back in a single movement makes the whole shape easier to hold.

か (ka), な (na) and た (ta)

か has three strokes: the line that goes across and then down, the slanted line on the left, then the dot on the right. Writing the slanted line first makes it hard to judge the gap between it and the first stroke.

な has four: the horizontal, the slanted line, the dot at the upper right, and the loop at the bottom. The dot is often left until last.

た has four: the horizontal, the slanted vertical line, the short horizontal at the upper right, then the horizontal at the lower right. Learners sometimes draw the vertical before the first horizontal.

は (ha), ほ (ho) and け (ke)

In は, ほ and け, the vertical line on the left is always the first stroke. The right side comes after it. If you draw the right side first and add the left line later, the space between them tends to end up too wide or too narrow.

How much to fix

Some people question whether stroke order matters at all. For kanji, Japan’s Ministry of Education published a stroke-order guide in 1958 that school textbooks still follow, and that guide itself states that orders it does not show are not to be treated as mistakes. Japanese language policy accepts a certain range in how characters are handwritten.

Even so, I think it is worth getting hiragana stroke order right early. The first reason is the one you saw above: the correct order is usually the order that keeps the shape balanced. The second is that the habits you build with hiragana carry over to kanji, where there are far more strokes to order.

If you already write some characters in the wrong order, this is how I would approach it.

• Start with the characters whose shape suffers. せ, や and ふ are good candidates.
• Fix one or two at a time. Trying to relearn everything at once usually means none of it sticks.
• Write the character slowly a few times in the correct order, then at normal speed. The slow repetitions are where the new order replaces the old one.

Checking one stroke at a time

The best way to check stroke order is to look at a diagram that adds one stroke at a time rather than at the finished character. Our hiragana and katakana stroke-order pages show every character this way, and the character names above link to their individual pages.

Even after studying a diagram, your hand can slip back into the old order. When that happens, watching a model stroke move and then tracing over it is a good fix.

StudyX Japanese Letters Tracer is an iPhone and iPad app for practising this. When you choose a character, the model draws itself one stroke at a time in the correct order. Write one stroke with your finger or a stylus and lift, and the next stroke appears. After the last stroke the model disappears and only your own writing is left. The app does not score or judge your lines, so you can write each character as many times as you like.

It covers 142 characters: hiragana and katakana, including the forms with dakuten and handakuten (が, ぱ and so on). Contracted sounds such as きゃ and the small っ are not included. You can switch the model between large, medium and small sizes and show a dotted cross guide, and a speaker button plays the character’s sound. It is a one-time purchase with no ads and no in-app purchases. On iPhone it runs in landscape.

For a first session, see Getting Started with StudyX Japanese Letters Tracer. For daily routines, see practice tips.