Posts tagged Testing from the Hanzi Write Practice team.
Tracing a character's components teaches you to recognize them, not produce them, which leaves a gap. Testing each component from memory closes it, and works offline in ADHD-friendly bites.
A tool that tracks and maps your practice on-device looks rigorous, but dashboards do not build memory. Active testing does: producing characters from memory, offline, scored by performance.
The gap between recognizing a character and writing it closes when you test production at the component level: can you build the character from its parts, from memory?
Leaning on translation tools quietly prevents you from ever building writing. The bridge out is component-level testing: produce each part of a character from memory until you no longer need the crutch.
Is dictation really worse than free tracing for testing characters? It depends on definitions, and the usual assumption is backwards. Here is what the science says.