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 Since we don't use those any more, the entire concept of "radicals" is obsolete and was discarded a decade or more ago.
I would keep looking up the stroke order for each character as you learn them. You will catch on to the rules pretty quickly. After 1 - 2 weeks I was able to guess the stroke order for most new characters I learned, especially once you know the stroke order of the most common radicals. In my intro course we didn't really go over the specific rules either, just learning by doing. And my teacher always emphasised that if you want to write legibly you should never deviate from the stroke order.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Well, sure, I mean when I talk about them with people who know Chinese, I usually call them "Chinese characters" since that's what the name means anyways. And if we're talking about Chinese specifically and its writing, sure.
But I'm still going to call them whatever comes to mind first, because that's how everyone's (including mine) brain works. Unless I'm ever speaking Mandarin, I'm definitely not going to make an effort to use that specific situationally "correct" word though.
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?
It doesn't though. You can look in any Japanese dictionary or the Japanese Wikipedia page since I assume you can read Japanese otherwise you obviously wouldn't be ignorant enough to be annoying about it, surely.
OK now I'm curious. Can you link one of these dictionaries which states that Chinese characters are called kanji? I'd like to show some friends.
Ah, so you try to be super condescending with repeated bad arguments, insult an entire culture's use of a writing system, and then you finally admit you actually have no idea what you're talking about, while asking for a favor. Yeah, I'll get right on that.
It should be easy since you were arguing about a Japanese word. Of course you can read Japanese enough to search for a definition, right?
repeated bad arguments
My arguments are good ones. I know what I'm talking about.
insult an entire culture’s use of a writing system
??? Where did I do this? Could you quote the offending sentence?
you finally admit you actually have no idea what you’re talking about
??? I'm the one who knows what he's talking about here. I've studied both languages. Nobody calls Chinese characters kanji. That's a completely different set of characters. Most Chinese people can't read them.
while asking for a favor
Here's a review of a Chinese dictionary that touches on the points I made about Japanese.
LMAO you're linking a random internet ENGLISH REVIEW of an ENGLISH BOOK about CHINESE to try to convince me that Japanese people don't know how their own words are used. Yes, exactly the type of source I imagined. I'm so glad I kept this going instead of ignoring you. That is hilarious.
So we confirmed that you can't read enough Japanese to read a Wikipedia page, now we also know you probably can't read enough Chinese to read a Chinese one. I've always wondered what possesses people who clearly can't speak on a subject to be so adamant. Maybe this is a troll but it's just so fascinating.
to try to convince me that Japanese people don’t know how their own words are used.
I think you are misunderstanding the argument and changing the subject. I'm saying kanji isn't used to refer to Chinese characters. Moreover, that Japanese characters and Chinese characters are different. They can't read each other's languages. There are some cognates but that's it.
Could you present some evidence that Chinese characters are called kanji?
Oof, in addition to not knowing either Chinese or Japanese, you don't know anything about linguistics or what affects mutual intelligibility. I really wish I could understand people being this arrogant about not knowing anything.
Ah well, I already specifically named some places you could read about how the word is used in Japanese. Since you said you could read Japanese, that would certainly be enough....Unless?
OK you are deliberately wasting my time by intentionally misunderstanding the point and quoting me on things I didn't say.
Before I go, could you clear up one thing for me? Do you watch a lot of anime?
I think you've wasted your own time (and mine) by not looking up something you've implied you could easily look up in the exact place I said. Well, that was fun to see someone scramble around so hard trying to look smart. That part with the dictionary review was so funny. What a reveal. Thanks for that.
