How to tell whether you actually wrote a character correctly

Most people check their writing the same way: write the character, look at it, look at the model, and decide it looks close enough.

That check is unreliable, and it fails in the worst possible direction — it passes the characters you got wrong, because your eye is comparing silhouettes, and a silhouette forgives a lot.

If you are learning without a teacher, this is the only feedback loop you have. It is worth making it stricter.

Three things to check, in this order

1. Stroke count.

The cheapest check, and it catches more than you would expect. Count the strokes on the model, count them in yours. A missing or doubled stroke usually still produces something that "looks close".

2. Where each stroke starts.

Not its shape — its starting point. A stroke drawn in the wrong direction often ends up looking almost identical, but it starts in the wrong place. Point at a stroke on the model, find the same stroke in yours, compare the two starting points.

3. How the parts sit against each other.

Left-right characters, top-bottom characters, enclosed characters — each has a proportion. Every stroke can be correct and the character can still be wrong because the left part is too wide, or the bottom part is too tall.

The 30-second version

Cover the model. Write the character. Uncover.

Then compare in this order:

stroke count
starting point of each stroke
relative size of the parts
where the longest stroke ends

Four checks, thirty seconds. It is slower than "looks close" and much faster than learning it wrong and finding out a week later.

The trap: comparing wholes

When you look at the finished character and the model side by side, your eye goes to the overall shape. The overall shape is the most forgiving thing about a character — it survives a lot of individual mistakes.

So do not compare wholes. Compare one stroke at a time. Put your finger on a stroke of the model, find that stroke in what you wrote, move to the next.

It feels tedious for the first ten characters. After that it becomes fast, and it becomes the thing that tells you the truth.

Why this matters more than another hundred repetitions

Practice only improves you if you can tell the difference between right and wrong. If you cannot, repetition does not converge — it rehearses whatever you just did, error included.

A hundred repetitions of a wrong stroke produces a very confident wrong stroke.

One thing you cannot check by looking

Stroke order is invisible in the finished character. A character written in the wrong order looks exactly like one written in the right order — until you try to write it from memory and the route is not there.

So stroke order has to be checked while you write, or before you start, against a reference. It is the one part of writing that the finished page cannot tell you about.