Hello everybody!
I am new to the platform. I find it really useful. It is by far the best platform for learning Chinese I have come across. However, there’s one problem I am faced with. HanziHero seems to teach one main meaning per hanzi, whereas in practical use there are often several meanings. I’ve been considering adding other meanings as synonyms, but it seems a bit excessive. How do you guys deal with this? Or is it even an issue? Grateful for your input!
This might help: Add dictionary item user definition | HanziHero Docs
But yes, hanzi hero is mainly for recognition of characters, and is best paired with other resources. Myself and a few others pair it with DuChinese, which is a good way to get exposure to multiple meanings of characters in different words and contexts. Like just yesterday learned 着想 zhuo2xiang3, I had somehow never come across that pronunciation/meaning of 着, which hanzi hero only has as zhe5 to continue, not even the very common zhao2 of zhao2ji2 or shui4zhao2.
Add other definitions if you’d like, but I’ve personally just decided to keep things simple and go with what hanzi hero already has.
Your not alone, this comes up fairly often. Cut and paste of my response to the other thread:
It’s not what you’re after but just study them outside HH since HH just doesn’t handle them at all. I honestly found it wasn’t that big a deal. HH won’t teach you to read or to talk - you need to do those activities yourself. When doing those activities, I found you’ll learn all the other pronunciations/uses of characters basically automatically.
Same with the other meanings - lots of characters also have multiple meanings, some of which have nothing to do with the HH key word. You just have to actually use the language and it’ll sort itself out.
So it’s annoying, but also not a huge blocker. Like Joe said - HH paired with DuChinese is awesome for this (and just studying in general).