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.
What gets better? "Radicals" were invented as a way to look up Chinese characters in a paper dictionary. Since we don't use those any more, the entire concept of "radicals" is obsolete and was discarded a decade or more ago.
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.
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.
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.
It's not at all, you just don't know what you're talking about. I know a lot about Chinese but haven't spent much time learning it. I have spent a long time learning Japanese and so my first instinct to refer to the same set of characters is "kanji". I typed that without thinking about it at all.
Kanji refers to all Chinese characters. When Japanese people talk about Chinese characters that aren't used in Japanese, they still call them kanji. Kanji and Hanzi are both anglicized forms of the exact same kanji characters: 漢字.
I think it's kinda weird to call someone else weird when you don't know anything.
No. It's extremely weird to pretend they are not the same thing, because 1) it's obviously wrong, and 2) there's clearly some motivation behind it. This was not about learning Chinese, it was about a set of characters, which China doesn't own, sorry. It's one thing and there are two anglicizations of it.
If you are so concerned about anglicization, stop typing it in latin script and only ever type 漢字, since words can't change, I guess. Then you can pretend it's pronounced however you want.
Also, the last line of your comment contradicts itself. If you want to pretend that the very modern version of one specific Chinese language is all that ever existed, you're going to run into the situation a lot.
Kanji refers to all Chinese characters.
That's where you're wrong, Bucko.
I typed that without thinking about it at all.
There's your problem, right there.
Kanji are Japanese characters. They are fundamentally different from Chinese characters. Calling Chinese characters "kanji" is wrong.
There are far fewer Japanese characters in the 2,136 in the jōyō kanji. That's all? You need 5,000 Chinese characters (called hanzi) to read a newspaper. Moreover Japanese never went through the simplification process of 1965 like Chinese did. The current list of standard Chinese characters contains 8,105 hanzi. Never call hanzi "kanji" again.
Wow, cute essay, hope you get an A on it.
Still doesn't have anything to do with what "kanji" means lol
Kanji refers to Japanese characters, which are distinct and different from hanzi, Chinese characters. Seriously, there isn't much overlap between them. What I can't figure out is that if you've studied...you obviously know this. So why the weird take?
