I was planning on giving you some useful tips on how to count brush strokes only to realize that I’m not 100% sure myself. I guess my best advice would be to look up some tutorials on how to properly draw the basic three and four stroke kanji. That might give you a feel for what sort of stoke shapes are and aren’t common. Example: a lot of kanji have strokes that go to the right and then angle down, but very few have strokes that start out moving down and then angle right.
Or you could just give up on stroke counting for now and try a different kanji look up method.
Vocabulary
目 = め = eye
Transcript
言語ガールズ #21
Relative VS Absolute
Blue: Let’s try looking up this kanji by stroke count.
Yellow: I count six lines, so is that a six stroke kanji?
Blue: It’s actually a five stroke kanji. The top and right lines were drawn with one angled stroke.
Yellow: So I just flip to the list of five stroke kanji and… WOAH!
Yellow: There must be a hundred of these things! How is this helpful?
Blue: Searching a list of 100 symbols is easier than searching a full list of thousands of symbols.
Yellow: Easier doesn’t mean easy!