I’m looking to start learning Chinese and was hoping to find something similar to WaniKani since it helped me a lot with Japanese. I came across Hanzi Express and it seems to have a somewhat similar approach. Has anyone here used it? What did you think?
I just found out about it today and I’m trying it out. You can do the first 3 levels for free.
So far, it’s by far the closest thing to WaniKani for hanzi. It’s quite rough around the edges - missing a lot of nice-to-haves that WaniKani has (ex: can’t add own meanings or mnemonic notes), the dashboard is a bit… hmmm… for examples, the number of reviews I have is confusing, and clicking “Review” sometimes reviews the same characters I JUST reviewed. Assuming they make improvements here and there in the coming weeks/months, it could be really good. (Assuming “really good” means as close to WaniKani as possible).
Hey, this is actually my app, so first off, thank you for trying it and writing all this up. This kind of feedback is great and will really help me improve it.
On the bug where clicking Review sometimes shows characters you just reviewed: it turned out to be a caching issue on our end. We’ve got a fix in that should sort it out. If you get a chance to try again, I’d really like to know whether it still happens for you.
On the review count feeling confusing: we intentionally seed some characters for immediate review, so that newer users have something to practice straight away instead of waiting for their first review. I completely get that this can make the numbers look off or unpredictable, and that’s fair feedback. Making the count and/or onboarding clearer is something I’m actively working on.
On adding your own meanings: we used to let people add custom synonyms, but we retired that in favor of an AI synonym checker that will hopefully catch all reasonable meanings of a character. The backend still accepts and checks synonyms, but we pulled the input out of the app for now. The idea is that a good answer just gets accepted without you having to manage a synonym list yourself. If enough people would rather add their own synonyms directly, we might add it back in.
Mnemonics and personal notes aren’t in place yet, but they’re very much on the list of things I want to add down the line. We’d love to add community mnemonics that people can vote on, though I think we need to build a larger user base first.
Would you mind telling me what type of device you were on? It would help me understand which rough edges are device-specific.
Thanks again for taking the time.