I’m trying to learn chinese on duolingo, and as I’m learning characters I try to write them down with the correct stroke order to help me memorize them.
I read the wikipedia article on stroke order, but there seems to be tons of exceptions and counter-intuitive stuff like the eighth stroke of “很” coming before the ninth stroke it connects to, or the order of strokes in the first radical of “忙” or whether or not “minor strokes” (丶) actually go last, etc.
Is there anyway to get better at telling what the stroke orders are, or do I just have to look it up for each character? Does it matter that much if I deviate from the standard stroke order as long as I follow the correct rules?
I’m not trying to be a calligrapher, I just want to be able to write legibly and remember what the characters are.
Practice more. You’ll find that most characters are either basic or made up of a radical + phonetic part, where both parts are common to hundreds of other characters, so once you learn a few radicals and basic characters you’ll already have a lot.
I haven’t practiced handwriting in ages and my handwriting looks like a chinese first grader’s, but when I did practice I would often just baidu search ”[character]字“ （for example 福字） and one of the top results would be a little animation on how to write.
And the basic principles make sense kind of on a character-to-character basis, like, top-to-bottom left-to-right works for most stuff but then there’s like “put stuff in your mouth before you close it” (for example 国）and “inside and then outside” (for example 水）so you can’t rely on an overall strict set of rules completely.
Radicals are an obsolete concept. They belong in the garbage can. Since we don’t use paper dictionaries to look up characters any more, the entire idea of “radical” is deprecated.
After seeing this comment on top of your other reply to my comment, I still can’t tell if you’re serious. This just gets better.
I would keep looking up the stroke order for each character as you learn them. You will catch on to the rules pretty quickly. After 1 - 2 weeks I was able to guess the stroke order for most new characters I learned, especially once you know the stroke order of the most common radicals. In my intro course we didn’t really go over the specific rules either, just learning by doing. And my teacher always emphasised that if you want to write legibly you should never deviate from the stroke order.
There are rules to it (as others have mentioned), but another tip is to learn the stroke order for different radicals. When you see the first radical of 忙 in that position, it will always have the same order regardless of the rest of the character. Break down a character into radicals, then figure out what order to do the radicals in based on their position, and you should be able to figure it out even if you’ve never seen the character before.
Learning handwriting is obsolete. A ton of work for little gain. Everyone uses phone or computer input methods. Hell, I don’t even handwrite in English any more.
If anyone has advice for doing this left-handed that would be appreciated, too.
