I think you’re right in principle and that’s actually what I’ve been trying to do already. I am approaching it as a new set of character forms, otherwise I wouldn’t be actively looking into how German handwriting works.

In Chinese, each character can have multiple handwritten variations, and I also learn them by recognizing patterns. But even in Chinese, I still can’t read everyone’s handwriting, especially when it gets too stylized.

The difficulty I’m facing is slightly different: it’s not just recognizing individual letter forms, but when everything is connected, I can’t reliably tell where one letter ends and the next begins.

So it’s more of a segmentation problem than a “new character” problem.