Does It Matter, Counting Strokes of a Chinese Word?

Yes, it does matter.

Counting word strokes in Chinese is not fruitless labor. Accurate stroke count is crucial when you look up a word in a Chinese Dictionary.

Calligraphy is not only indispensable training in learning Chinese giving you beautiful handwriting, but also a necessity when you look up words in a Chinese dictionary.

The number of strokes matters in daily life because the dictionary index depends on it. A wrong count of strokes might cost you a lot of time before a word in the dictionary can be found.

Learning Chinese character, one must practice the strokes and learn to count the strokes accurately.

In the following lessons, I will show you how to count the strokes in Simplified Chinese as well as Traditional Chinese, when there are differences between two systems.