Direction of strokes

MDBG chinese dictionary has the answer: http://www.mdbg.net/chindict/chindict.php?page=chardict&cdcanoce=0&cdqchi=%E4%B8%80&cddmtm=0&cddytm=0 There are stroke diagrams for most common characters there. They on rare occasions differ from those that I've found from other more 'authoritative' sources, but I tend not to get worked up about 'perfect' stroke order beyond a certain point.

When looking at stroke direction, printed or on screen characters can be misleading. Here's a few tips. 1. Whenever you have a choice of font, pick one that has "kai" somewhere in its name. 2. Some types of font have equal thickness strokes and tend to square everything off rather than letting the strokes slope and curve, looking more mechanical than hand written. Avoid them like the plague, they will mislead you into thinking the character components are different. 3. Some stupid prissy fonts have a little blob at the far right of straight horizontal strokes, e.g. 二 would have two of them. In hand writing, these strokes should end cleanly, no hook or blob or anything at the right hand end. 4. The direction of most strokes is easy to work out if the font is half decent. The one type of stroke that can be tricky is the one that is written right to left, curving down and to the left. For example, the first stroke of 我 or 看 in each case is not a horizontal (left-right) but one that is written right-left and almost horizontal but not quite. With a Kai style font, you might see that the right hand end is a little thicker, as if the brush started writing on the right. That's your hint. 5. Sometimes there can be left or right confusion with other strokes too, and again you can use the brush thickness changes as a hint. In the character 我 the fourth stroke is a little sloping one, not quite horizontal, which cuts the left part of the character near the bottom. Is this written from the left upwards to the right, or from the right downwards to the left? You can't tell anything by its shape alone, but you can get a hint by the brush stroke, since usually they are a little bit thicker at the end where they start. Of course you should always check some reference to be sure of the stroke order and direction when there is doubt, but these few tips are all you should need to make sensible guesses on the fly.

This may be helpful: http://www.geocities.com/chinesevenice/scrittura/scrittura1.htm

Thank you all for your extremely helpful responses! For some reason I feel as if my ability to read and write characters is going at a faster rate than spoken or listening. I think partly it could that it is easier to practice to read and write on my own than it is to speak because what I think I say may not actually be what I say... Thanks again

Go with the flow. I find that by the time I've learned to write a new word or character, and written it out in sentences or phrases instead of just repeating the character, then I know the pronunciation and the meaning and usage of the word. If you started with writing the character (after hearing the word e.g. in a dialogue), then no additional study time is required to get the speaking, listening, usage, or reading. One pleasant way to do all of this is to copy (yes just copy) dialogues by hand while the lesson plays on auto-repeat. In the beginning you might examine each stroke before writing it, but pretty soon you get lazy and read a whole phrase once before writing it down, without even trying to learn.

That is a great suggestion to write out as the dialogue is in the background! I will try this out for a while I think. I think the really useful thing that happens when writing is that picking up the sentence structure becomes easier to identify than when simply listening or speaking