It’s all about time
I definitely didn’t get to practice over the past three weeks as much as I had hoped—but I have made progress.
I’ve had Alice, whose first and most fluent language is Chinese, review my practice book from time to time and she’s been giving me some additional tips. One thing that becomes difficult as I practice more characters is that the printed form of some characters (even when massively enlarged) do not match up with the proper written form—so I can’t actually know what the proper stroke is. That’s why it’s handy that my books have the written versions. I just need to be careful.
Alice says I still have some obviously Western traits, such as slanting vertical lines, which wouldn’t be so bad, but I slant them the wrong direction as well.