Having tried to pick up on learning Chinese a few times and with various different learning apps and websites, this is by far the most useful learning tool I have come across. It teaches you how to break down characters’ meanings from the ground up, and assign useful memory tricks to remember a character’s meaning. Even if you don’t follow the little stories or tricks it has for each character, it teaches you to start coming up with your own ways of remembering them and do what works for you.This is a great tool for starting out learning how to read Chinese, since it helps you learn the definitions of each individual character and helps you grow your knowledge exponentially by introducing new characters that consist of the ones you already know. And, it tests you on them at a great pace to make sure you are retaining that knowledge. This app is not designed to get you fluent, nor is it meant for speaking or listening practice, but it is an incredible method for getting you started. Chinese is very hard to start learning because even simple introductory phrases and words are made of complex characters, and you may end up memorizing their sound or pinyin instead of their actual characters. But, Hanly starts you with simple characters first so you can work your way up to words that have simple meanings but are made of complex characters. It is a very satisfying way of learning the language, and it helps you start being able to use other learning tools to their fullest extent since you will have the necessary baseline knowledge to start learning words, phrases, and sentence structure. I can’t recommend it enough!!

This is my first app review ever- usually I don’t write reviews. I am super grateful to have found this app through a Reddit post. I was surprised at the quality of the app- it is a flash card style, where the meaning behind each character is explained and a helpful visual analogy is provided to help you memorize the strokes. It is super cool because on the other face of each card you can see sentences and other words (if applicable) using the current character, with audio playback. Pleco connection is possible. I am stoked to keep using this app because I’ve been trying to find a resource to learn characters and this app seems perfect if you want some number of new characters to learn and recall/practice recalling each day. It even shows you the live action of how to write the character at hand, which I will use to practice writing on paper. Overall probably one of the best Chinese learning apps I’ve found due to its consistency, quality, expanse of content, and ease of usage. You can even enable the traditional character to show up on the front of the flash card for each character, in the settings. Thanks developers!!!

Now THIS is what Chinese learning should look like! Much better than Duolingo or HelloChinese. By learning each character from its components, it makes it much easier to learn a lot of them. The developer has also done a great job putting in stories through the learning sequence so you can better understand the Chinese language as a whole. Hanly also has great customization options on rate of learning as well as specific words or phrases. It’s allowed me to be able to learn Chinese for the first time to communicate with my wife’s family.The developer has also been very responsive to feature requests and issues, and the pace of improvement is impressive. They’ve already added words and phrases as well. My biggest hope is that they continue development of this app far into the future!Thank you Hanly!

As an American born Taiwanese, I have basic Chinese listening and speaking skills but am completely lacking in reading skills. This app is helping me bridge that gap. It is well laid out, goes step by step to introduce characters and characters that are part of other characters, gives definitions and words that involve that character, keeps track of characters you know and don’t know, and has a built in system to regularly test you to reinforce character recognition. The app is still in development, but what is already there is quite impressive. Looking forward to continued expansion of this learning app!