I’ve been using Hanzihero for a few days now, and, so far, I’m loving it.
The UI is stellar, the mnemonics make sense and so does the order in which things are presented.
I would love to grind away on HH for a few hours at a time, or at least have the opportunity to do so. The daily limit puts a cap on that ambition, unfortunately.
It feels wasteful to wait for the next set of lessons while being in a position where I can study more.
The superb “extra study” widget helps to grind out a few extra drops, but after more or less getting all known items to stick, there’s nothing left to throw oneself at.
I understand the load will ramp up as I go on, but I would love to get there sooner, and for the lesson ceiling to be just a little higher.
I’ve checked out recent blog posts touching on this topic, and I completely understand the general need for a cap.
I’m wondering, however, if there’s a way to integrate a feature that allows a user to effectively ‘overclock’ the limit. Maybe it’s possible to present the option in such a way that clearly shows how generally irresponsible an (e.g.) 40 lesson/day limit is, while still giving the user this option.
I really like HanziHero, and I’m dreading the idea of having to jump fence to Heisig’s RTH just because it doesn’t (physically) enforce a limit.
We’ve discussed adding a “jump-start” lesson limit for those onboarding onto the app so they can get to a healthier amount of reviews earlier, and then it is reset back to 20 items/day. I think this ought to solve this issue for you, but
I can’t think of anything at this time to solve this one. Ideally with a high enough daily lesson limit, one wouldn’t need to “reset” for more lessons.
I guess one option we could offer is “tap into the next day lessons” or something along those lines. Would you mind explaining your main objective here? If you want to basically “time travel to the next day” to do more reviews and lessons, then I would understand what you mean
Or, in another view, maybe to keep the “healthy” limit of 20 items/day, but if you’re feeling more motivated, then you can request to see more lessons that day.
That would be an absolutely stellar feature. What could that look like? The user gets served the usual N of lessons with an option to continue past the limit as per desire?
I’ve just now realized that traveling to the next day won’t up the workload in the grand scheme of things anyway🤦. Please disregard my initial comment.
I think this sort of thing could be covered by a “Target Study” idea previously discussed. With “Target Study” one could select the items they want to review and jump into an Extra Study session with them
In the meantime, I’ve added Jump Start mode 🏃 which you can use to speed up your onboarding
I didn’t wanna start a new topic cause I have some thoughts on the daily limits but it has been discussed so much already.
At the moment i wish there was a way to only limit the new characters but not the words. Cause i really wanna catch up on all the “easier” words but also don’t want to compromise on learning new characters.
In addition it would be cool to have the ability to study 40 new items one day and then do only reviews for the next 3 days. Because the time and energy one has for lessons can vary a lot by the day at least for me.
I have days where i love every new word and character and i could keep going for 20 more. Then there is days where i do my reviews and then dread doing the lessons at all. For me lessons take a lot more concentration then reviews.
But maybe this is just my personal view cause i am not scared of suddenly having 300 reviews.
An idea would be that if you haven’t done the lessons the day before you get double. Or an option to do double today and then get 0 the next for when you know you’ll be busy the next day.
Or maybe if you don’t do them each day, have them accumulate until a certain threshold? this way it doesn’t feel as bad to miss or skip a day of lessons or two.
Or maybe there is a weekly joker for 10 extra lessons : P (just random ideas at this point)
I admit this is complaining at a high level and not something that is a big problem.
I wanna hear how other people that are already a few months into hanzihero feel about this! Do you still sometimes wish for more lessons or has this craving vanished over time?
I could see this being useful. Doing 10 lessons everyday vs. 20 and 0 alternating wont make a big difference in review toil long term. But like you said, maybe you have the energy to do 20 lessons some days, no energy other days.
To allow this, they should just have a user setting to remove the lesson cap. Ive been at this almost 300 days consecutively. Im experienced enough to manage my lesson cap. However I think the average new user would abuse it, wind up with 200-300 reviews and terrible retention rate, and just quit the website.
Yes but then i won’t learn any new characters.
I don’t want to learn more than 5 to 7 new characters in a given day anyway but I’d love to learn more than 13 words since they’re easier to recall and really help solidify the characters.
But this is only true on days when i am especially motivated and on others i don’t wanna learn anything new.
So i was more thinking about making use off/ accommodating for jumpy motivation levels.
But as i said it’s not a huge deal, i just wanted to add my thoughts on it so you have more opinions to go off of, if you think about changing the daily limit setting in the future
Would it potentially be possible to change the “jump start mode” into something like a “turbo” mode? i.e you can boost to 40 from 20 whenever you want, instead of only when your score is below 3 and you are just starting?
This could be an option, we’ll give it some thought. Of course the main reservation is how it’s very easy to get a crazy amount of reviews – this is at least from my experience with my poor daily limit management from years of flashcards
Not adding much to the debate but wanted to underline the situation with my little experience: I’ve pushed the daily lesson to the max for many days now and I’ve never reached more than 100 reviews a day. I also feel pretty confident in my ability to increase the workload and sometimes feel a bit frustrated (If I practice a lot on the side) to not be able to lean the new characters I prioritized until a few days.
Also sometimes I just want to do more than 40 min of hanzi hero and speed things up.
Instead of prioritizing items I make Pleco flashcards of them (pasting HH memonics in it) and I mark the item as “skipped” in HH once decently rembered.
The flip side is that for people who want to spend several hours a day studying, the current limits push us to spend most of our time on other learning platofrms before we have any kind of significant foundation in hanzihero.
This feels like a HUGE waste because the time Im spending hitting my head against a wall trying to memorize new words in duchinese could be going much smoother while reinforcing the hanzihero mnemonics
If you allow me to give some advice, there are many resources that you can and should use while building your hanzi capabilities. I’m about 2000 hanzi in and I still find characters that I don’t know in basic content all the time, so that’s something that you’ll have to learn to accept. Instead of trying to memorize things just move on to the next reader and let the language wash over you, or go watch something to get used to the sounds of the language, or go practice your pronunciation, etc…
If you study full time doing everything right you will be able to reach a good level of fluence in probably around 2 years, most likely 5. So patience is key.
Although your advice is very much appreciated, there is a point where beginner friendly input has a digestable ratio of known / unknown characters. The current jump start cutoff is, seemingly arbitrarily, well below that point. Increasing it a few ranks would make a big difference in this regard
I have discovered a bug that effectively doubles the daily lesson limit.
(I will not be sharing it until I no longer want to be doing 40 lessons a day haha)
Thanks for the feedback about the onboarding ramp up
It’s hard to argue against building up a reasonable fluency of the first ~200 characters or so as you look for content
As others said, you will always have to look up a character as you proceed into the later stages of Chinese, but it is nice when starting out to not have to look up as much, especially if you find HSK appropriate content.
I can see a solution of bumping the “Jump Start” cut off higher
I guess you have the bug as a fix for now – I think we’re aware of which one it is but it hasn’t been that high of a priority. Perhaps this secret ritual shall be the solution instead
It’s tough to strike a balance between letting people get to that “beginner inflection point” e.g. ~200 characters for HSK-1 material, while also not sentencing them to 1k+ reviews later on we’ll give it more thought
I definitely understand the concern with not wanting people to build up an impossible review load. I eperienced this firsthand with spanishdictionary.coms SRS system (although i think your mnemonic / memory palace technique makes it much more manageable, since I dont seem to ever “completely” forget anything on HH)
Maybe this could be further alleviated by additional practice modes / having a granularity in the SRS system. I noticed during my reviews today that some words/characters were recalled instantaneously and others I had to really work through the components for a minute. The ability to flag specific items for additonal practice and rating hard words so they show up in the SRS system sooner (or maybe the inverse, where very easy words show up later?) could be useful
One way you can achieve the same result is by setting some rules for yourself. For example, if you can not remember a character or word in 2 seconds you mark them as wrong, this was they will appear in the extra study section as well as in your upcoming reviews.
– I think we’re aware of which one it is but it hasn’t been that high of a priority. Perhaps this secret ritual shall be the solution instead 