I second this. When you have to actively pay close attention to the proportions and stroke order, distinguishing other characters at a glance becomes much easie

I second this. When you have to actively pay close attention to the proportions and stroke order, distinguishing other characters at a glance becomes much easier. Though with that said, I also rote memorized a lot of chemical structures, pathways and several rows of properties of the period table. It’s essentially the same as learning a language. You need a certain “vocabulary” before you can reach a higher order of reasoning. But I would also be careful with suggesting “copy everything verbatim to learn it”, since it helps you to mostly memorize it, but not necessarily to reason about it. Memorizing the first 5000 words of a language is useful. Memorizing the dictionary is not.