Work · alternatives · 2026
24 alternatives to Hanzi Stroke
Hi HN, I’m building Hanzi Stroke (https://www.hanzistroke.com) to solve a very specific problem: learning to write Chinese characters is unintuitive for non-native learners. Most learners rely on rote memorization, which is inefficient and often leads to incorrect stroke habits. While there are dictionary apps that show static stroke order diagrams, they lack interactivity. The key to muscle memory is deliberate practice with immediate feedback. So, I made a single-page application that provides: Dynamic stroke order animations for over 9,000 characters. Interactive canvas practice…
Below are 24 products that do a similar job, ranked by how close each is in meaning and then by launch-day votes.
- 1IT
Built this because tones are killing my spoken Mandarin and I can't reliably hear my own mistakes. It's a 9M Conformer-CTC model trained on ~300h (AISHELL + Primewords), quantized to INT8 (11 MB), runs 100% in-browser via ONNX Runtime Web. Grades per-syllable pronunciation + tones with Viterbi forced alignment. Try it here: https://simedw.com/projects/ear/
Jan 2026 · simedw.com · its alternatives →
- 2

Hanzi Dictionary & Strokes ,for hsk learners
Dec 2025 · accounts.google.com · its alternatives →
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Laoshi▲239Learn new words with flashcards to master Chinese faster
2021 · laoshi.io · its alternatives →
- 5

Just for fun, I built a language learning tool. It represents Chinese and Japanese as graphs of characters, with connections indicating given characters can form a word. It can also decompose characters to give clues on how they're pronounced, analyzes words to understand which ones are commonly used together, and more. It's fully interactive, supports offline use, generates flashcards, has sentences from humans and from AI, and plenty of other features. Check out the README for details. https://github.com/mreichhoff/HanziGraph
2024 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 6
QWANJI▲174Hey HN! I've built this bit of cuteware (software not solving a problem but just for fun) inspired from the patterns made by swipe typing on mobile devices. To me it seemed like the closest thing to an English version of Kanji and it would be cool to consistently recreate those patterns. The implementation is vanilla js to keep things simple (and from a bit of framework fatigue) I'm keen to see how people use qwanji. Any and all feedback welcome!
2024 · byronicalpatrick.github.io · its alternatives →
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- 8AF
I'm a long time lurker that recently quit my job to work on my own projects, a lot due to the inspiration from Hacker News. Now I have published my first serious project, an app for learning how to write Japanese characters. It's the app I always wanted but couldn't find when I was studying. It tries to be simple to use, you just start the quiz and go with the flow. There's no need to plan and manage your studies, and it uses spaced repetition for better retention. There's a promo page with more details up at http://www.kanjibyhand.com. It's only for Android so far. The free version includes…
2012 · kanjibyhand.com. · its alternatives →
- 9

Visual Tricks to Master Chinese Characters.
2025 · hanzihack.com · its alternatives →
- 10HG
Tap on a character to reveal the strokes, radicals and components it has in common with the character you're trying to guess. This was designed mainly for learners but I'm curious to hear from fluent hanzi readers whether the game is too easy. The vocabulary is from the Chinese Vocab List project [1]. Character graphics and data are sourced from Make me a Hanzi [2]. There are 95 pre generated games at the moment which are randomly chosen, more will be added soon. Suggestions welcome! [1] https://github.com/kerrickstaley/Chinese-Vocab-List [2]…
2022 · hanzi.gg · its alternatives →
- 11

Master Chinese reading through AIpowered interactive drawing
Dec 2025 · sketchhanyu.aigility.digital · its alternatives →
- 12

Hi HN! In trying to improve my Chinese skills, I built this tool that lets me write a mix of Chinese and English, then recommends a proper Chinese expression. This is super helpful when I want to write something in Chinese but I don't know all the vocab/grammar - I can enter my best effort and use English for the parts I don't know. Really, the fundamental benefit of the tool is that it encourages me to exercise the writing muscle, rather than defaulting to translating from English. My goal was to build something that is fast, relatively inexpensive, and not prone to misleading people.…
2024 · unscrambler.dpw.me · its alternatives →
- 13NN
2016 · otoro.net · its alternatives →
- 14

Chinese dictionary and training tool with AI
2021 · apps.apple.com · its alternatives →
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Learning Chinese one tab at a time
2020 · chromewebstore.google.com · its alternatives →
- 18

Hi HN, Just wanted to share a tool i've been working on to help with my own study routine. It’s a browser extension called Lingoku. The idea is simple: we spend hours browsing the web in English every day. This tool replaces some of the english words with Japanese vocabulary based on your japanese level (Similar to Toucan, but with a better user experience). It’s basically an attempt to make the "i+1" method actually passive, you understand the sentence because it's mostly english, but you pick up Japanese words naturally from the context. It uses an LLM in the backend to make sure the…
Dec 2025 · lingoku.ai · its alternatives →
- 19

Customizable, animated stroke order for Japanese characters.
2017 · mbilbille.github.io · its alternatives →
- 20

Learn Japanese hiragana and vocabulary with cute characters
2023 · apps.apple.com · its alternatives →
- 21

Beautiful, minimalist Chinese writing for iOS & Android
Jun 2026 · apps.apple.com · its alternatives →
- 22

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Master Chinese HSK vocabulary with smart flashcards
Aug 2026 · hanzimemo.app · its alternatives →
- 24

My co-founder and I built a Chinese language learning web app that helps you quickly master the most common Chinese characters and recognize 95% of real content. JinbuPal uniquely enhances learning for maximized progress by allowing effortless personalization of your daily study. When I dreamed up JinbuPal, I was a maker just like others in the HN community. I was working on my electronic hardware startup and I thought that learning the fundamentals of Chinese would help me communicate with manufacturers in Shenzhen. We designed JinbuPal to help you leverage data and your own curiosity to…
2023 · jinbupal.com · its alternatives →
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Ranked by how close each launch is in meaning, then by votes. Prices were read from each product’s own site when checked and can change. Refine with your own description →