Shu4 and Pie3
Now I’m starting to get somewhere with shu4 (豎) suspended needle. It’s just a matter of being fast with the pen. I still have a bit too much of a starting “Nail’s head” though. There’s a tiny bit of a turn at the top, and I make it too large. I can now write 一 (1), 二 (2), and 十 (10) somewhat reliably. That’ll get me far.
I’m starting to practice pie3 (撇) now along with the other 2 strokes.
For some clarification, the strokes I’m practicing actually look like this: ⼀, ⼁, and now ⼃. I’ve been writing the names using Pinyin (which comes from the Mandarin pronunciation of the names) followed by the Chinese for the name of the stroke. I only now discovered that OS X’s character palette does contain glyphs specifically for the actual strokes.