HelloChinese deserves its good reputation: it is well-structured, beginner-friendly, and genuinely strong on listening, speaking, vocabulary, and grammar. So this is not a takedown. It is about one specific gap that many of its users notice: manual writing practice is thin. If you want to actually write characters by hand, you will likely need to add that yourself.

What HelloChinese does well

Credit where it is due. HelloChinese has a thoughtful curriculum, good audio, speaking practice, and a smooth way to build vocabulary and grammar. For getting started and developing listening, speaking, and recognition, it is one of the better comprehensive apps. Many learners make real progress with it.

So keep it for those strengths. The issue is narrow and specific.

The gap: manual writing

Like most comprehensive apps, HelloChinese leans on recognition and typing. There may be some stroke or writing exercises, but producing characters from memory by hand, the core of actually learning to write, is a minor part. The result is the familiar imbalance: your listening, speaking, and recognition climb while your handwriting lags, because the app rarely makes you generate a character from nothing. That is the recognition-versus-recall gap from the case for a dedicated Hanzi writing app, and the same pattern we describe for Duolingo and FunEasyLearn.

This is not a flaw so much as a focus: comprehensive apps spread across many skills, so the hardest, narrowest one, handwriting from memory, gets the least depth.

The fix: keep it and add writing

You do not have to choose. The strongest setup is complementary:

  • Keep HelloChinese for listening, speaking, vocabulary, and grammar.
  • Add a focused writing tool for the from-memory drills it lacks: produce the character, check stroke order, review on a schedule, see blind drawing.
  • Practise the characters you are already learning in HelloChinese, so the two reinforce each other.

This way your writing keeps pace with the rest of your Chinese, instead of falling permanently behind.

Where Hanzi Write Practice fits

Hanzi Write Practice is built to be exactly this complement. It does not try to teach listening, speaking, or grammar, HelloChinese has those. It does the one thing HelloChinese is thin on: from-memory writing, drawing each character on a grid, checking stroke order, pinyin, and meaning, with spaced repetition. Run it alongside HelloChinese and your handwriting stops being the skill that gets left behind.

HelloChinese is a great main app. Just add the writing drills it does not emphasise, so you can speak it, read it, and write it.

Join early access and add the writing HelloChinese leaves out.