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.
I think i learned to do the top to bottom strokes of the character then the strokes that go from left to right. Sorry if that doesn’t make sense or is wrong its was over 10 years ago and is hard to describe the feeling.
If anyone has advice for doing this left-handed that would be appreciated, too.
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.
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.
