So something that probably won't come up with Duolingo, since you probably aren't learning how to write is that Japanese, Chinese have stroke orders.
So for every character, there's a single order that they should be written.
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Some would say English has this too, but it's not as demanding. Someone writing the letter a in a funny way, will still be understood.
This stroke order serves a few purposes.
1.) Character recognition. Sometimes with especially stylized writings, you'll have a character that will end up looking like another. But determining which stroke comes before which one can help with figuring out which character was written.
2.) Character look up. There are a couple of ways that characters can be organized in a dictionary, and one of them is by using the number of strokes.
When you get more competent with writing Japanese/Chinese, you can usually tell how many strokes are used in a character.
So you can look up what characters use 7 strokes, and hopefully you'll find whatever character you are trying to identify.
3.) Nice handwriting. Having a system and having a flow to how you write can help make your characters legible.
Fun fact, Japanese and Chinese have slightly different rules for character writing, so sometimes characters will be written differently in one language compared to the other.
So for every character, there's a single order that they should be written.
Some would say English has this too, but it's not as demanding. Someone writing the letter a in a funny way, will still be understood.
This stroke order serves a few purposes.
1.) Character recognition. Sometimes with especially stylized writings, you'll have a character that will end up looking like another. But determining which stroke comes before which one can help with figuring out which character was written.
2.) Character look up. There are a couple of ways that characters can be organized in a dictionary, and one of them is by using the number of strokes.
When you get more competent with writing Japanese/Chinese, you can usually tell how many strokes are used in a character.
So you can look up what characters use 7 strokes, and hopefully you'll find whatever character you are trying to identify.
3.) Nice handwriting. Having a system and having a flow to how you write can help make your characters legible.
Fun fact, Japanese and Chinese have slightly different rules for character writing, so sometimes characters will be written differently in one language compared to the other.