Is any of you familiar with HanziHero? They are self-proclaimed a “Wanikani alternative to Chinese”.
I haven’t tried it but I saw some videos online where they present it as basically a complete mnemonics + SRS system very similar to Wanikani, also in the UI design. I’m honestly quite happy to know that the quality of the WaniKani approach is spreading to other language-learning communities.
What do you think? Is it legit or is it just smoke that will disappear in a couple of years?
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I’m not currently looking to learn Chinese, but I looked at the site, and it seems reasonable. The idea of a srs + mnemonics isn’t exclusive to Wanikani, so I’m sure it could help for Chinese too.
The one thing that would give me pause are the founders describe their Chinese experience as “starting during covid” and “a few months” respectively. There’s also no mention of anyone else writing the content which makes me think the founders are writing it themselves. That feels a little insufficient to start teaching to me. Even WK occasionally has mistakes or (more often) “maybe that’s not the best way to explain/translate that”, despite having a lot more Japanese experience in the site team.
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I’ve looked into it before, but personally I think there are some major issues that keep it from being as effective as Wanikani.
Cramming the initial sound, final sound, tone, radicals, and meaning into one mnemonic is a little too much imo.
For example here’s their mnemonic for 铁, tiě, meaning iron.
So, basically a weird story vaguely related to iron with the character and setting indicating the pronunciation and the radicals kind of thrown in there haphazardly.
Let’s compare this to Wanikani’s mnemonics for the corresponding Japanese character, 鉄, てつ.
The character isn’t any more complicated in (simplified) Chinese than it is in Japanese, but the WK mnemonic is much more succinct and memorable imo.
What really makes Wanikani’s mnemonics so effective is they tend to focus on a strong emotion or sensory experience. You feel surprised and disappointed that the gold you found is in fact just iron. And if you take 30 seconds to watch the trailer for Tetsuo, you’ll never forget it.
HH’s mnemonic includes lots of information, but without that sensory/emotional element, I’d struggle to recall it.
Disclaimer: This is all my opinion, your mileage may vary, etc.
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This makes me realize I may need to pay more attention to mnemonics
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I tried HanziHero and Pandanese. HanziHero’s mnemonics are too convoluted and there are too many classes of items to memorize, it over complicates the method for memorizing tones. If I ever finish WaniKani, I’ll probably start Pandanese to refresh my Chinese. 
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I googled “Hanzi Hero” and got this:
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That’s an unexpected plot twist 
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