Hi. I’m really enjoying HanziHero and it’s helping me a lot, but I’d like to suggest a new feature that could make the app even better:
Being able to create our own lists and studying from them with words or whole sentences.
Sometimes I find new words or sentences “in the wild”, like from podcasts or reading texts and news and I’d like to import them to HanziHero instead of using their own flashcard systems or even Anki itself (so I just use one SRS instead of a dozen). Having this feature would be really helpful.
This is something we want to add at some point, but will take a while to get to.
Our plans continually change, but here is our rough idea:
First, we want to import all words from CEDICT to HanziHero. This is a popular free dictionary with over 100k entries. This will make it so if you look up any words, you should be able to find them and study them within HanziHero. These words will be different from our main vocabulary words in that they won’t have a mnemonic or example sentences and won’t be taught via the lesson system. They’ll also behave a bit differently in that it will require you to manually select (or enter) a definition when adding them to your reviews.
However, such a feature will make it so HanziHero can replace external SRS systems for most cases. Given that we ourselves use HanziHero, this is something we definitely can see the use of, as using an external SRS system for words can be a pain. Plus I think typing out meaning/pinyin is a core feature of HanziHero that other SRS systems don’t do as well.
Having this functionality would also pave the way towards vocabulary lists in the far future.
However, we have no timeline for the above, as it is a very large change that touches nearly all parts of the application. We plan to continue to fine tune the current functionality before expanding the scope of the application.
For now, the best thing to do is to use the word prioritization feature. We are striving to add more and more words to HanziHero, especially more common lower-HSK words over time.
Thanks again for your feedback and suggestion. We view HanziHero as something that will continue to evolve and improve, and community feedback is the main way we figure out the long term priorities of what to work on next.
This all sounds awesome. A few questions/ comments
Why use an external dictionary vs just allowing arbitrary words? The user could the add phrases/expressions. In my studies Ive come across neologisms that wasnt in pleco.
How will you handle 多音字? Esp cases like 好处 where the meaning greatly varies. Will it be both answers accepted?
For example sentences, you could consider using chat gpt.
Much of this is still up in the air, so we’ll think about these questions more when we get to the point of planning and implementing it.
For the first point, I see having a “word bank” to choose from as a first step, and doesn’t preclude us allowing users to add their own words later on. It incidentally also fits better into our current architecture.
I love the idea of a ‘wild word bank’, where users can add words unknown to Hhero, but I hope that we could bring them into this wild bank with the ability to add our own story to it, into a private mnemonic or notes field for each word. After all, we came here to learn a system where the use of mnemonics is key in the learning process. When searching for words, if not found in the hhero database, we could search in the wild database, if there, we can add our own notes to it, similar to what we do with hhero database, where we all have the option of writing our own mnemonics in the notes field, if the official version does not stick.
