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?
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.
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.
This makes me realize I may need to pay more attention to mnemonics
I googled “Hanzi Hero” and got this:
That’s an unexpected plot twist 
I just started hanzihero about half a month ago (just finished free tier) and I’ve found it to be similar to wanikani but with a few differences. I don’t like using the mnemonics at all, not just for hanzihero but also for wanikani. The difference is that for wanikani I can just choose not to use them, but hanzihero makes you learn weird names/mnemonics for all the basic sounds. It’s a pain to go through every single sound and manually skip them, though that’s an option if you don’t need to learn sounds like me (I speak Chinese, just suck at reading and wanted to pick up studying it again.)
Other than that, the biggest issue is that you can only do reviews once a day. The lessons seem to be limited as well, even though I put the daily lesson limit at its cap since it was so slow. Maybe it’s just me since many of these characters I know (but I just keep forgetting which tone they are so I decided to practice again), but even with the few characters that are new amongst the free tier it just seems really slow. I’d ideally like to be breezing through at least 10 or 20 characters a day since it’s not that hard yet, then have the option to slow down later. I’m conflicted on whether to buy/subscribe since it’s just not that efficient right now, but I know that maybe if I push through the slowness right now and get to a point where the current limit is actually what I can handle (by reaching the harder levels) then maybe it’s worth it? Not sure. I checked out pandanese for a hot minute or two before starting hanzihero but all the advice I read said hanzihero is better, and that seemed to track then, though I might look into it again. Part of me thinks we need a movement/petition to hanzihero to just make them increase the speed and allow reviews multiple times a day. Once a day won’t cut it and it’s not worth $349 USD for something so darn slow.
If you don’t need mnemonics, I made this one for my use case. Only if someone else could fit it helpful. (Not sure if someone else successfully run at all.)
I will definitely try it out! Thanks a bunch 
that’s too bad. I’m in a similar situation and I just use an anki deck based on the HSK, fwiw.