Hi! Liking HanziHero very much until now! Just reached lvl 2 though, so I’m still very new.
But I do like searching around and viewing stats and the like. And I think an overview of which characters (and components and words maybe?) that are covered for each level would be interesting. It would also be interesting to see which characters belong to which HSK level (while being able to see your progress for each character like here https://hanzihero.com/simplified/characters). I think it would be a good way to keep motivation and curiosity up to see where you are according to your current goal and where you might like to set your next goal.
Bonus minor issue: Also it’s very very tedious to scroll through thehttps://hanzihero.com/simplified/characters to see how many total characters are in the curriculum as it only loads the next 50 characters each time you scroll down Maybe it would be more practical to add a page selector where each page shows 50-200 characters? This is just a suggestion, but I assume it’s something you would like to improve in an UX perspective in some way at least.
Anyways I’m loving the software until now, of course there are some small irritations and nice to have things I long for, but it seems you almost just launched and I was lucky to randomly find you for my Simplified Chinese hobby studying (I’m also trying Pandanese which seems to have been around for years, and to me it seems like you guys are currently blowing them out of the water! )
Bonus bonus: If you throw in a lifetime subscription I might easily be tricked into buying it, as I prefer to own rather than rent stuff like this, especially as it is a bigger threshold to return to a subscription service when you might be uncertain how much time you would use on it every day for a period and if it is better to postpone (and hence postpone indefinitely as one sometimes does ). But I am not your finance advisor, so I’ll just throw it out there and try to stop my ranting!
Yeah, the curriculum list pages can be improved for sure.
We plan to improve it in two ways:
Make it so these curriculum list pages load more at a time, so the scroll is less janky.
Make it so these curriculum list pages have additional filters, sorting options, and so on.
We’ll look into adding HSK levels to one of the filters, in addition to adding HSK level into the character/word pages themselves.
Another thing we want to do for giving better insight into progress is add some statistics to the dashboard. Stuff like seeing the breakdown of the items learned, the breakdown of items learned per HSK level, all over time.
Right now we are looking into doing some mnemonic structure changes to make them easier to process and understand, but these quality of life improvements are next on our list!
We’ve had a bunch of people ask for it. We initially didn’t have it because we were missing large pieces of functionality (we just added simplified course only a month and change ago!) so felt that we should delay introducing it until we covered the essentials. But I think the main functions and features we want the app to have are all there now. I can see us adding it probably before the end of the year, but no promises . We just need to figure out a fair and reasonable price for the ~4,000+ characters and ~6,000+ vocab words we plan to have when all is said and done.
I wish instead of just the " SRS Stage Distribution", there was a dedicated progression page I could look at.
You could filter by an arbitrary subset of item types, e.g. see only characters + words.
I’d like to see total # unlearned, bronze, silver, etc. maybe with bar graphs or something where you could click on an SRS group (e.g. gold) and see all items in that group.
I wish the SRS group marking was more intuitive in the curriculum tabs. Right now, it’s just a colored triangle on the upper left, and many of the colors look basically the same at a casual glance.
would be cooler/more intuitive these markings were more distinguished.
similar to League of Legends ranked borders, you could have the marking become progressively more sophisticated and prominent, e.g. larger size, more details, brighter and more varied colors.
Kind of a nitpick point, But as we’re basically using the LoL/Valorant rank system, I wish the final tier was called Master, or in this context you could call it “Mastered”, making it more intuitive that this item has been mastered.
Gonna go on a tangent and write this here because it’s related, the CN course still feels kinda in Beta still - there are only ~300 words, and there are a few features and information missing (esp. word definitions, parts of speech), s.t. I still have to pretty much look up every single item for supplementary information. That said, I decided to go ahead and sub for the whole year, as I see it as an investment in the project. It’s like barely 1 person-day of funding, but hopefully more people will join in as well.
I live in the bay, and have a lot of Chinese/Taiwanese American friends (I am not). I’ve told several of them about the app, and many have expressed interest. I think the site (especially if you include a level skip + sound/component skip features) hits the niche of people who want to read Chinese but don’t want all the 3-6 months+ “你好，我叫。。。” etc. grammar stuff. I think tones of 2nd generation folk are in that bucket.
We hope to rework the words/components/sounds/characters list pages into one dedicated page that will offer a more comprehensive set of filters. This would allow one to easily look at all within an SRS group, order by “SRS rank”, or order by most recently learned items, among other things.
progression page
We want to add a basic statistics overview to the dashboard to allow one to easily see their progress.
Rank names, colors, indicators
We have been mulling over changing the names and colors of the ranks so that they are more visually distinct. Nothing certain yet, but we definitely agree that the current colors are too similar.
And yeah I agree with @lorentz about the just about 300~ words for the Simplified version, but I assume new words are being added continuously up to the stated 3000-6000k.
Another thing I wanted to suggest/ask for is a way to do a review with a select number of characters/items, as doing 100+ items in one session can take a lot of time. Maybe opening the option of being able to portion it down to 20-50 items per review session. I prefer to do all my reviews each day, but sometimes you don’t have time for a 30-60 min review session
To better understand your needs, can you tell me what advantages you see for this over just refreshing or closing/reopening the Reviews page whenever you come back to the Review session?
Right now the one disadvantage of refreshing or close-and-reopen a Review page is that some items that are only partially answered (i.e., only answered the meaning question, but not the pronunciation one yet) will be “restarted”. As in, you’ll have to answer both questions once more upon refresh/restart.
To address this disadvantage, we have thought about adding a “wind down” button that would help ensure you finish off all of the partially answered items. Once you press it, it would only show you the items that are partially started, and once they are all finished, the review session would end. This would allow one to cleanly end a review session whenever they please. Would something like that address your needs?
Yes, I think the wind down solution would solve my needs on this. As I previously have been “scared” of ending the session as I assumed any wrong answers would not be registered if the pair was not completed, and I would end up getting a better score and less reminders on hard items if I quit while only failing on one part of the item set and not completing the other. And ending up seeing the item reset in the next review session, where I have an extra reminder as I failed previously, while the algorithm not knowing that I know this better because I was reminded recently by failing.
I filed a ticket on our end for this. I think we’ll get to it sooner than later, as it is something we have always wanted, but just have put off to make time for other features. When we get it out we’ll have an announcement for it.
Just to say that I too would definitely buy a lifetime subscription when / if it may come out (even though I’m only on day 4 so far since signing up and have already converted the trial into an annual subscription). I’ve bought lifetime for other things in the past, e.g. WaniKani, the Chairman’s Bao, Roon (music software) etc. It’s a hit to the pocket initially of course but the cost can then be forgotten about and the app enjoyed (or perhaps one day picked up again in the case of WaniKani) going forward!
Maybe it would be more practical to add a page selector where each page shows 50-200 characters? This is just a suggestion, but I assume it’s something you would like to improve in an UX perspective in some way at least.
(I’m also trying Pandanese which seems to have been around for years, and to me it seems like you guys are currently blowing them out of the water! 
)
. We just need to figure out a fair and reasonable price for the ~4,000+ characters and ~6,000+ vocab words we plan to have when all is said and done.
