[evertedsphere]

The situation with Chinese/Japanese calligraphy is much more like that which many English speakers have with reading untidy handwritten English (see doctor jokes) or idiosyncratic autographs or signatures.

How well can you write Japanese by hand, with correct stroke order? Doing that, in my experience, makes it a lot easier to understand 行書 — in the same way that knowing cursive makes reading untidy or artistic cursive easier — but 草書 does still take a lot of work. (I'm not there myself yet!)

[xrd]

I know the strokes well, or at least I did. I recall being corrected in class when I lived in Japan. I was so proud of my kanji and the strokes were completely out of order and my Japanese classmates made me well aware of that.

I'm actually building a way to practice the correct stroke order while reading Japanese classics.

For example, this passage from Natsume Soseki's Kokoro:

https://community.public.do/t/kokoro-by-natsume-soseki-parag...

If you click on the kanji section, you can click on any of the kanji and then a modal pops up with an animated kanji with correct stroke order and then a free draw canvas on the right.