Stroke Order for Chinese Characters

When you learn to write Chinese, it's important to learn to write the strokes for characters in a certain order. It makes the drawing easier, and the rules usually make perfect sense; you draw from left to right, top to bottom etc.

You can find the basic rules presented in a clear way here. You also find what types of strokes there are, and what they are called (which you really most likely don't need to know even if you're learning Chinese).

When I've looked at different Chinese textbooks, I've noticed that the stroke order in characters is not always the same - or at least in one Finnish textbook they are trying to teach us wrong ways of writing the characters. :/ I guess it doesn't make that much difference in practice if you write some individual characters in "your own way", but usually it's better to stick to the prescribed order. In calligraphy the stroke order is more important naturally.