Constant Self-Evaluation
After each small practice round of a stroke or character, I’ve decided to go back and look at them all—circling the one(s) which I believe best represent what I’m attempting to write.
As for other baseline tests; I went through Learning to Write Chinese Characters and selected 10 characters at random (not completely random, I just flipped through the book and pointed at some) and guessed at the stroke order. I got 2 correct. I also looked back at the “eight basic strokes” and attempting to name them—I currently supposedly know the names of 4 of them, as I’ve been practicing them, but only correctly recalled and labeled 3 of the 8.
As far as practicing goes, it’s nice to attempt to write characters now and have a couple of them come out decently (at least, in comparison to my previous attempts). Strokes as well—while I still only consider very few out of a given batch to be decent at all, they are as a whole much higher quality than before.