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 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.