What if you learn all the stroke orders in the wrong order?
You don't need a teacher to learn stroke order properly, you just need to learn the basic rules and make a habit of looking up the stroke order for new characters you learn. This will feel like an additional burden for a while, but you'll soon learn the rules and you will find that you can often guess the right stroke order, even for a character you have never seen before.

If your goal is to write neat, beautiful characters, then you do need input from a human, but to learn basic handwriting and stroke order, you don't have to have a teacher, as long as you look things up.

Some suggested resources:


Pleco or Hanping for looking things up on your phone
ArchChinese or MDBG for looking things up in your webb browser
Looking things up in printed books is a pain, especially if you're a beginner
Many apps teach you stroke order: Skritter, Pleco, TOFU learn.


Stroke order might feel like a big hurdle for you at the moment, but it really isn't that hard. Compared to learning any other aspect of Chinese; stroke order will only end up taking up a very small proportion of the time you invest. Just look things up as you learn new characters and after learning a few hundred characters, you'll wonder why you thought it was so intimidating when you first started out.