Personally, I find it very useful when characters are assigned to levels in WaniKani. It helps me group characters in my mind (HSK levels are too large to do this effectively). Most importantly, it allows me to identify leeches. If I’m on level 20 and have a review for a level 6 term, I immediately know that term is a leech and I can do extra studying specially for it.
It would be nice if we could keep seeing the hsk level for words after we learn them and just remove the word if it becomes a leech and is way above our current HSK anyway. IK I could just look it up, but the last thing I wanna do is break my flow in the middle of a review
Good points. I think we can show additional information at the top of the review UI to better convey “how familiar it should be”. Maybe either the HSK level and/or how long ago it was learned, for example. I’ll add a note to our backlog.
An extra study section for leeches would be great.
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There is this “rank” concept that seems to be barely used. It seems to only be visible on the main page and next to our forum avatars, with no other apparent purpose.
In WaniKani, “ranks” are called “levels”, and these levels are used to group and separate 漢字. Is there a reason HanziHero chose to implement the rank feature but not use it to categorize hanzi? Is there some other planned functionality for the rank system? Or is there something I’m missing?
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The rank is an indicator of how many hanzi you have learned.
Earlier versions of HanziHero had something vaguely similar to what you describe, with different “levels”. We got rid of it for a variety of reasons:
- There are far more hanzi that one needs to learn than kanji. HanziHero currently has 3.2k simplified ones and 4k traditional ones, with plans of still adding more. The HSK tops out at 3k, but still misses common ones that would be found in an e.g., “3000 most common” frequency list. This, in turn, required far more “levels”: 100+. This is fine, but requires more effort to form a greater amount of them, despite the fact that they are not inherently useful groupings. Which leads to:
- Levels are arbitrary. One can use a frequency list or the HSK list to try to cut and splice them up, but ultimately these groupings have no deeper meaning. This is not inherently bad, if it weren’t for the next point.
- Levels artificially block progress. If one needs to learn all hanzi in a given proficiency to a certain level before being able to move on, as we initially implemented it (and AFAIK, this is also how WaniKani works), then one ends up fighting against the HanziHero system instead of it assisting them.
- Levels delay progress. Earlier versions of HanziHero had a system where one had to learn all radicals in a given level to a certain proficiency before moving onto learning the characters. And likewise with moving onto the words within that level later. This means that having a little bit of trouble with a group of items in one level may lead you to be stuck there for a while. If you read in-depth reviews of Wanikani or similar systems, you will notice how many had to design their life around the scheduling algorithm in order to speed things up, because otherwise each level would take twice as long in real-world time.
- Levels don’t work well with arbitrary prioritization and free-form learning order. With item prioritization, one can learn a character of any rarity at any time. Given that learning the many requried hanzi one needs for Chinese proficiency is a many-year experience, we don’t think it is appropriate to ask people to “just wait” until they reach some arbitrary level to learn what they need to learn and memorize today.
Ultimately HanziHero and WaniKani are completely separate platforms, with different goals and philosophies, related in turn to the fact that they are based around two very different languages that just happen to share parts of a similar script, in the same sense that French and English both use Latin characters and words of Latin origin.
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You do raise a great point about the “rank” thing we have being pretty neglected and ill-explained. We definitely hope to do more around it in the future and other things to make HanziHero feel more “game-like”. However, the ever-growing backlog of some other improvements we want to get out to users towers above us, restricting us on this front a bit for the time being. 
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