Hanzi Pen

Hanzi Pen turns the slow, deliberate work of learning Chinese characters into a guided practice loop. Every character you encounter becomes something you can read, recognise, and, most importantly, write from memory.

WHAT MAKES IT DIFFERENT

• Writing comes first. Trace each stroke on screen, get per-stroke feedback on length, position, and missing hooks, and graduate to writing from memory. The app coaches you toward the actual mechanics of each stroke type (横, 竖, 撇, 捺, hooks, turns).
• Spaced repetition built in. Every character you practice joins your SRS deck with independent mastery for writing, reading, and translation — track each skill on its own, mark the ones you already know, and let cards resurface exactly when forgetting starts.
• Etymology that actually helps. Each character's detail page shows its phono-semantic / pictogram / compound-ideogram structure, the meaning and sound role of each component, and a prose origin story sourced from Dong Chinese.
• Across Asia. Chinese shares thousands of characters with Japanese, so a character's page can show the Japanese on'yomi and kun'yomi readings, and even which hiragana and katakana the character became (安 → あ / ア). A quiet bridge for anyone who already knows some Japanese or is curious how the writing systems connect.
• Real example sentences. Over 64,000 Tatoeba sentences indexed by character with mixed-difficulty selection, so you see the word used in short, medium, and longer real-world contexts.
• Measure-word coaching. Every noun's detail page shows which 量词 to pair it with (个, 位, 名, 只, 条, 部 …) and explains the nuance — polite vs. formal vs. casual.

CORE FEATURES

• HSK 1–6 vocabulary with official-list filtering
• 3,000+ characters from HSK 3.0 with stroke-order graphics, etymology, and decomposition
• 110,000-entry CC-CEDICT dictionary for words and compounds
• 10,800 learner-friendly single-character definitions
• Multi-character word breakdown — tap any word to drill into its sub-words and individual characters, with pinyin grouped word-by-word over example sentences
• "Don't mix these up" guidance — side-by-side notes on easily-confused look-alikes (重 / 垂, 土 / 士, 未 / 末, 天 / 夭 …)
• Tone sandhi (一 / 不) applied to example-sentence pinyin
• Multi-pinyin readings shown for every character (得 → dé / děi / de)
• Handwriting search — draw a character you saw somewhere with no stroke timeout and no auto-clear, then tap a candidate
• Vocabulary lists with paste-import, shuffle, and per-list practice sessions
• Quiz modes: writing, reading (pinyin), translation, and combined — each skill tracked independently, and settable by hand when you already know it
• Component questions: "which is the meaning component? which is the sound?"
• Per-stroke coaching after each writing attempt
• Live canvas resize via pinch + drag handle
• Practice history with one-tap undo for accidental "I know this"
• Switchable Simplified / Traditional display
• Dictionary searchable by hanzi, pinyin, or English
• iCloud sync across iPhone and iPad
• Profile customization (avatar glyph, name, and a selectable accent theme colour)

WHO IT'S FOR

• HSK 1 / HSKK beginners drilling the first 600 characters
• Heritage learners filling in writing gaps
• University and high-school Mandarin students preparing for proficiency exams
• Anyone serious about character recall! Writing, not just recognition

PRIVACY

All learning data lives in your private iCloud space. No accounts, no ads, no analytics, no server-side tracking. Nothing leaves your device except the iCloud-synced records that only you can read.

OPEN-DATA ATTRIBUTION

Built on CC-CEDICT (CC BY-SA 4.0), Tatoeba (CC-BY 2.0 FR), Make-Me-a-Hanzi (LGPL / Arphic Public License), chinese-lexicon (ISC), and Dong Chinese wiki etymology (CC BY-SA 4.0).