HH is the app I have been looking for! I used to use Wanikani (similar HH but for Japanese) but after level 16 I stopped because I didn’t see I would be in Japan in near future. With HH, I am a lot more motivated because I will actually visit China and stay there for a few months.
I have been using HH for 6 months (starting in Feb 2025) and have not skipped reviews even a single day. I spent about 1-1.5 hours every day and try to do it in the morning when your brain is still fresh to learn. I tried to do the reviews at night when I am sleepy and tired, but it was a lot more challenging, frustrating, and less accurate. Bad idea!
I also started to have an online tutor for my speaking and listening, and have been watching Chinese content, which helps a lot in keeping the motivation up.
I am posting this as a milestone after just finishing HSK 3 characters, and I am hoping I will stay motivated until reaching my goal of HSK 6 on HH in 1 year.
Some tips and methods that I used:
Do the reviews and lessons in the morning
If you don’t have a big chunk of time to do everything, doing it half or most is a good idea, and later finishing the remaining tasks is a lot less scary
When the reviews are becoming overwhelming and too much, just scale down the learning by five or ten
There some days when you are not feeling it and answer a lot of the reviews wrong, even the simplest ones. Don’t worry, it is part of the learning, it will most likely bounce back. Take a break, scale down the new items.
I spend a lot of time on lessons. Starting HSK2, I tried to make up my own mnemonics for each character. The mnemonics consist of the component, the tone, the hanzi we have learned, and the hanzi with the same pronunciation (same tone even better). If the character is part of common words, I also use that word as part of the mnemonics.
I also review recent mistakes and new items every day.
9 months check-in, it is still going strong!
I finished HSK 4 & 5 in HH in 3 months, and I found another app that complements my reading progress: Du Chinese. I increased my goal to 2000 characters (from HSK 6, which is 1800 characters) in 1 year on HH, planned to stop learning new characters, and transition to Du Chinese after reaching my goal.
During HSK 5, my motivation has been up and down, but I managed to do it every single day, and now I can see that I am getting closer to the finish line. I am more motivated.
I recently visited China for 1 month, and it was a fantastic experience where I was able to read the characters. However, because of a different font, I missed some characters or guessed them incorrectly. Also, I had trouble understanding the meaning as a whole, even if I could read all the characters. I think practice and using them in context, such as in Du Chinese, will help. I am open to more ideas on improving my reading skills.
Some more tips on HH:
There are some bad days when it seems that you have everything wrong. It is normal, especially in non-optimal conditions. I always (like 100% of all time) bounced back a couple of days later. So don’t get discouraged when that happens, and that’s what I told myself.
If you feel overwhelmed, do fewer lessons for a few days until it gets manageable.
Learning Mandarin is a marathon; day-to-day learning intensity is less important than showing up consistently day after day.
Have a purpose for learning Mandarin to keep motivation up. Visiting the country and making friends with locals will help a lot!
FYI - if you’re using DuChinese you can change the front while reading to practise recognising the more calligraphy style characters/fonts. It has HeiTi (default computer font, all strokes equal width so looks good/consistent at all sizes), SongTi (little serifs at the end of strokes so it has brush stroke hints but still looks ok at small sizes) and KaiTi (made to look like characters drawn with a brush, strikes taper etc as if they were drawn, but hard to read/bad at small font sizes).
After I changed my DuChinese font over to KaiTi and used that for a while, it made reading signs/logos way easier. To change it, when you’re reading a story in the bottom left you can click the three little lines to get the menu (bottom right icon for me), then change your font to KaiTi. The downside to KaiTi is that it doesn’t look good at small sizes so you’ll probably have to increase your font size, but it’s great otherwise. If you’re not already using it, it’ll suck for the first few days then you’ll get used to it and it’ll be completely fine!
In general though congrats on your consistency. Your graph is magical and almost doesn’t look real it’s so perfect!
Thanks for sharing. Great tips, too…though it doesn’t look like you have taken too many slow days 