Caoshu, 草书, full cursive, is the deep end of Chinese writing, and it is worth being honest about just how deep. It is so abbreviated and stylized that reading it is a specialist skill many fluent native readers do not have, and expecting an app to reliably recognize it is asking for something genuinely hard. Here is why, and what actually helps.
Why cursive is so hard
Caoshu compresses characters drastically: strokes are merged, connected, and omitted, components are abbreviated to gestures, and the same character can look quite different in different hands. What remains is closer to a trained shorthand than to standard writing. Reading it depends on already knowing the regular and semi-cursive forms so well that you can infer the abbreviations from minimal cues.
That is why ordinary literacy does not include reading cursive. A person who reads newspapers fluently may be unable to read a cursive scroll, because cursive is a separate, advanced layer on top of standard writing.
Why recognition apps struggle with it
Handwriting recognition works best when forms are consistent and close to standard. Caoshu is the opposite: highly variable, context-dependent, and far from the regular form. So an app trying to recognize cursive faces an inherently harder problem than recognizing regular-script writing, and you should treat any claim of reliable cursive recognition with healthy skepticism. The same caution applies as with WritePad-style handwriting recognition, only more so.
The only real foundation
There is no shortcut into cursive. It is an abbreviation of forms you must already know cold, which means the prerequisite is deep mastery of the regular script (楷书) and ideally the semi-cursive (行书) too, see practising xingshu. You learn to write characters correctly and from memory first, then study cursive as an advanced calligraphic pursuit through models and brush practice. The progression mirrors the point in learning shufa basics: each script rests on the one below it.
Where Hanzi Write Practice fits, honestly
Hanzi Write Practice does not recognize or teach cursive, and it would be dishonest to imply it could. What it builds is the bedrock that any cursive ambition requires: producing characters correctly from memory in the regular script, with stroke-order feedback and spaced repetition. Cursive is a distant, specialist goal; solid regular-script recall is the road that eventually leads toward it.
Admire caoshu, and respect how hard it is. Then build the regular-script foundation that makes it even conceivable.
Join early access and master the regular script cursive is built on.