This paper proposes a novel method which enables a Chinese character recognition system to obtain reliable recognition. In this method, two thresholds, i.e. class region thresholdRk and disambiguity thresholdAk, are used by each Chinese character k when the classifier is designed based on the nearest neighbor rule, where Rk defines the pattern distribution region of character k, and Ak prevents the samples not belonging to character k from being ambiguously recognized as character k. A novel algorithm to derive the appropriate thresholds Ak and Rk is developed so that a better recognition reliability can be obtained through iterative learning. Experiments performed on the ITRI printed Chinese character database have achieved highly reliable recognition performance (such as 0.999 reliability with a 95.14% recognition rate), which shows the feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed method.