Hanzi handwriting acquisition with automatic feedback

One of the most crucial distinctions between Chinese and Western languages is that the former is based on ideograms, whereas the latter is based on phonograms. Due to this distinction, Western learners of Chinese often experience more difficulties in grasping correct character stroke sequence and/or stroke direction relative to native Chinese speakers. In this paper, we designed a HanZi writing environment with automatic feedback to address the above issue. Before the collection of HanZi characters on a massive scale, we conducted a pilot study to collect handwritten Chinese samples from 160 college students in the U.S. The findings from this study enabled us to further refine the learning environment and design optimal learning and teaching strategies for learners and teachers.