Five habits to drop early when you grew up with the Latin alphabet

Learners coming from Vietnamese have one advantage that rarely gets mentioned: they are already used to memorising the shape of a word, because Vietnamese has tone marks and every word has to be remembered individually. They also have a disadvantage: Vietnamese and Chinese are written on different mechanics, and habits carried over from Vietnamese often work against you.

All five habits below come from that difference.

1. Drawing the shape instead of writing the strokes

Latin script is written by joining letters in a direction that is roughly fixed, left to right. While writing, you do not think about "stroke order" because each letter has only one natural path.

Chinese is different. Each character is a set of strokes with a defined order, and that order affects both the shape of the character and your ability to remember it. Someone used to Latin script tends to see a character as a picture and redraw it. It looks close, but it does not stay.

The fix: before writing, count the strokes and say the order out loud. Slow, but correct.

2. Confusing the left-falling and right-falling strokes

Neither stroke has an equivalent in Latin script, so they get mixed up or drawn as one curve.

The left-falling stroke (丿) goes down and curves left, getting thinner towards the end. The right-falling stroke (㇏) goes down and curves right, getting thicker towards the end. Different direction, different weight.

Write 人 with both strokes curving the same way and you have a different character. Write the right-falling stroke of 大 as a left-falling one and the balance collapses.

3. Not fitting the character into its square

Vietnamese is written along a line with varying letter heights, and nothing needs to be centred. Every Chinese character has to sit inside an imaginary square, and the squares have to match.

The habit from Vietnamese produces uneven characters: dense characters swell, sparse ones shrink. The line looks messy even though each character is correct on its own.

The fix: practise on squared paper, and check whether the character touches all four sides of its square evenly.

4. Learning new characters without reviewing old ones

This is the most common habit and the most expensive one.

Ten new characters a day sounds efficient. Without review, after a week you have 70 characters and remember part of them. After a month, you have "learned" 300 and can maybe write 100.

The fix: fewer new characters, more review passes. Six new characters plus 30 reviews usually beats 15 new characters with no review.

5. Writing wrong without knowing it

When you study alone, nobody corrects you. You write a character with the wrong stroke order, nobody says anything, and you repeat that same mistake twenty times. By the time you notice, it is a reflex, and undoing it is much harder than learning it correctly once.

The fix: use a tool that grades strokes, or check against a stroke-order model right after each attempt. Checking immediately is far cheaper than checking a month later.

The common thread

All five come from one place: Vietnamese cares about shape, Chinese cares about the path. Once you move from "how do I make it look right" to "am I going in the right order", most of these problems disappear on their own.

You do not have to fix them all at once. Pick one, work on it for two weeks, then move to the next.