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.
There aren’t all that many pieces in all. You will recognize similar parts in many kanji, so if you pay attention, it’s not like you will need to memorize something totally random for every character. The whole right side of the first character in your examples is extremely common. You’ll learn it.
Also Wiktionary is a website that has the origins of a lot of characters (though there’s probably a better one, if anyone knows tell me). If you dig far enough through the parts of a character, you will eventually get to something tangible, if you’re that kind of person. I did it for some characters, and it did help me.
The tried and true method for native learners is just writing them a bunch so there’s always that.
kanji
This is not Japanese. It’s Chinese. Two completely different languages.
