Content
950+
Hanzi across HSK 1, HSK 2, and HSK 3 in the current version.
HanziDragon
Learn Chinese Writing
Learn hanzi step by step.
HanziDragon helps you build real confidence in Chinese characters through handwriting, stroke order, radicals, readings, meanings, and compound words — with a calm, focused experience.
Offline
Yes
Most learning features work offline. Sync uses Apple services when available.
Experience
Clean
Minimal UI designed to keep attention on practice, not on distractions.
See it in action
Watch a character come together, layer by layer.
Handwriting-first practice
Practice characters with custom handwritten input and a natural calligraphic brush feel.
Learn in small steps
New information is introduced gradually: reading and meaning, stroke order, radicals, then writing.
Human-recorded audio
Readings are voiced by a native Chinese speaker to support accurate pronunciation.
Under the hood
What makes HanziDragon different
Recognition runs on your device
Your handwriting is read entirely on your iPhone or iPad — no cloud, no account, and it keeps working offline.
It catches look-alike mistakes
When you confuse similar radicals — 日 and 月, 木 and 本 — HanziDragon points it out, instead of just marking the character wrong.
Radicals shown in color
Each radical gets its own color in the stroke-order animation, so the structure of a character becomes visible — not memorized blindly.
One layer at a time
Meaning, strokes, radicals, then words — introduced gradually, the way the brain actually absorbs new information. No cognitive overload.
Two ways to practice
Guided Path walks you through characters lesson by lesson. Open Practice lets you pick your own characters, exercise types, and pace.
Built on a proven engine
From the makers of Robokana, our Japanese kanji app. The same writing engine, refined over years and adapted for Chinese.
How HanziDragon helps
- Introduces hanzi gradually instead of overwhelming you all at once
- Teaches stroke order and structure through guided writing
- Uses radicals and components to improve memory
- Reinforces readings, meanings, and compound words through focused tasks
- Lets you learn at your own pace
Built for focused practice
HanziDragon is designed for learners who want a calm and structured way to practice writing. It supports iPhone and iPad, syncs progress between devices, and keeps the learning experience simple.
Frequently asked questions
Do you break characters into radicals, components, or something else?
We call them components, and that is the technically correct umbrella term. Radicals are a narrow subset: about two hundred pieces used to index dictionaries, and each character has exactly one dictionary radical. For learning to write, the distinction barely matters, so out of habit we sometimes say "radicals" too. What the app shows you is the full component breakdown of each character.
Why do you color the components?
Inside a plain black character every stroke looks equally important, and nothing tells you where one component ends and the next begins. Coloring makes the structure visible: we noticed that it helps grasp the spatial layout of a character much faster, at least in the early stages. We tested it on ourselves first, and our users keep confirming it works for them too.
Is each component always the same color?
No, and this is the part people miss. The color follows the position, not the component: the first component you write is red, the second yellow, the third green, and so on. 礻 is red in 福 because it happens to come first there. In another character, a different component takes the red spot. So the colors are really showing you the writing order.
Do I write in colors?
No. The color is scaffolding you look at, not ink you write with. You write with an ordinary pen or your finger, in one color. Once a plain black character starts falling apart into components on its own, the scaffolding has done its job.
Can I write anywhere on the canvas, like on paper?
Yes, and this is our strong side. The app recognizes real freehand handwriting instead of matching strokes against fixed positions on the canvas. Write the character small, or in a corner of the canvas: we will still read it.
Why do you tolerate stroke order mistakes?
Honestly, this is a compromise, and a deliberate one. It is not hard to build a strict algorithm that rejects any deviation from the reference order; it is just very annoying to practice with. It is also not too hard to train a network that only looks at the final image and ignores stroke order entirely, but then the app would stop checking the very skill it is supposed to teach. The hard part is building a forgiving system: one that is lenient with beginners and accepts minor swaps of adjacent strokes within a component, while still catching real stroke order mistakes. That is what we built.
What is writing feedback?
Writing feedback is a HanziDragon feature that analyzes your writing for stroke sequence, direction, and stroke count. When your writing deviates noticeably from the reference, it shows a breakdown of what went differently, with a side by side animation of the reference and your own writing. We are quite proud of this one.
Do you support traditional characters?
Not at the moment. The curriculum is 953 simplified characters following the current HSK 3.0 standard.
Does the app need an internet connection or an account?
No. Handwriting recognition and writing feedback run entirely on your device. The app works offline and does not require an account. Nothing you write leaves your device on its own.
What about characters that do not split into components?
They exist, and the app does not pretend otherwise. Some characters are a single component (永), some components change shape depending on position (示 narrows into 礻, 心 flattens into 忄), and some splits are a judgment call. Where a decomposition helps the hand, we show it; where it does not, we do not force one.