Exiting Beta

We wrote the first mnemonics and lines of code for HanziHero just over a year ago. Frustrated with the existing ways of learning Chinese characters, we set out to build out the ideal application for learning Chinese characters. Since then, we’ve added nearly 4000 Chinese character mnemonics, hundreds of components and words, and have helped ourselves and our users collectively learn thousands of Chinese characters!

After a year of fine tuning the application and responding to beta user feedback, we are confident that HanziHero as it exists today is ready for prime time, and the time is right for us to finally exit beta.

If you are an existing user within our generous free tier (at or below rank 5), you can continue to use the application as before. Enjoy learning hundreds of characters, words, and components to evaluate whether the HanziHero approach is right for you.

For those who are beyond the limits of the free tier, in other words at or above rank 6, we’ve added a new banner to the dashboard asking you to subscribe to HanziHero sometime before July 15th. If you choose not to, you will continue to be able to review what you have already learned, but after July 15th will no longer receive new daily lessons.

For those that want to subscribe to HanziHero, we’ve added a documentation page describing how to do so. Doing so unlocks all of the thousands of characters and words we have today, as well as the thousands more we plan to add over the coming months. We thank you for your support!

Exiting beta does not mean we are done adding features—far from it! We plan to add thousands more words to our traditional curriculum as well as make some improvements to the existing mnemonics over the rest of the year. Separate to that, we are in the midst of building out the beginnings of a simplified Chinese curriculum for those wanting to learn simplified characters along with mainland China pronunciation and vocabulary. Additionally, we have tens of smaller quality of life improvements that we have filed away in our backlog that we are eager to get to soon. We have a lot of work ahead of us. In many ways, we are just getting started.

Our goal now is the same as it was a year ago when we started building out HanziHero: to create the ideal way to learn every Chinese character one needs for fluency. Whether it is simplified or traditional, a common character or one that is rarely seen, we hope to continue to make learning Chinese characters approachable and enjoyable.

We would like to thank our beta users that have given us invaluable feedback from small bugs to clever ideas to implement. HanziHero would not be where it is today without you.