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.
speling n gramer also no longr meen'ngfol
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 Since we don't use those any more, the entire concept of "radicals" is obsolete and was discarded a decade or more ago.