Literacy in written phonetic symbols for East Asian languages is important but challenging for novice language students with only English language fluency, but pedagogical approaches such as rote writing practice and written technique have successfully assisted students towards written mastery. Researchers and developers are also adapting these approaches into intelligent educational apps for students to exploit interactive computing technologies for learning written East Asian language phonetic symbols, whether they are full-time students in K12 or higher education enrolled in conventional classrooms or non-traditional students studying the subject as a passionate interest. However, related pen and touch educational computing apps for sketching practice of East Asian language phonetic symbols provide limited assessment and flexibility of students´ input and sketching style, while related recognition systems either focus more on expert users´ writing styles or cannot provide assessment for more complex phonetic symbols. In this article, we describe our preliminary work on an intelligent sketch-based educational interface developed specifically for assessing students´ sketched input of complex East Asian language phonetic symbols. The interface system relies on template matching from expert users´ sketched training data and various heuristics for assessing the visual structure and technical correctness of students´ more complex written phonetic symbols. From our evaluations of separate sketching data from both novice and expert writers, we were able to achieve reasonably robust performance for both visual structure and technical correctness of our workbook interface for complex written East Asian language phonetic symbols.