HanYou - Chinese Dictionary Reviews

I’m a student and I’ve been struggling trying to learn Chinese while studying other classes. Quite honestly the best app I’ve ever used and it does crash but barely and it found every character I needed to find. I will be buying the unlimited and I believe you should too. The one time fee is definitely worth and helping the developers for their great work.

My only complaint is that the text analyzer glitches once you go past a certain number of lines/characters. Same problem with Yomiwa. Please fix, otherwise great!

You can get all of the features of HanYou in other apps that won’t cost you. A review from two years ago complains about how the translator won’t accurately translate sentences, and the developers even responded and said they were going to get it fixed. It’s been two years and the translator still does not work. Pleco is a much better dictionary and just about every function of HanYou has a better, free counterpart. Even the camera translator that is its supposed claim to fame is worse than Wechat’s camera translator. Final thought: don’t waste your money like I did on this mediocre app.

I love HanYou and recommend to all my friends. There was a bug last week and after reaching out to the developers they responded immediately and fixed it!

this app really helps me increase my vocab in Chinese. Not only I learn the meaning of new words, but I get the pronunciation too. Flash cards are useful too

I love HanYou, it helps very much! I get to confirm when I do my chinese homework and I’m finally glad I found something free to help translate using a photo!!!

Translating feature is accurate

Really helped me save time and actually has a working camera function. Very nice.

I especially like the draw dictionary.

HanYou is completely useless for one with no knowledge of Chinese characters trying to interpret a string of characters. I've not been able to get it to translate anything correctly, even a string of characters for which I know the translation.

I suggest HanYou Can include some synonyms in Chinese and more details about the definition. Other wise great!

So bloody helpful for my homework

I never did too much on it, it does not offer much. Download ChineseSkill instead if you want to learn Chinese.

... too many updates.

Photos are accessible without explicit permission.

I am a previous user of Yomiwa (the Japanese counterpart of this app), which I already loved. This new app is as handy and great for well-needed on-the-fly translation. I am traveling to Shanghai next month and will for sure use it a lot!

OCR is always a tricky thing. HanYou does a pretty bang up job, but has difficulty with certain things such as text and background contrast, stylized text such as calligraphy font and extra thick fonts, and characters with lots of strokes. One such example is 臺灣. It performs best on plain text containing thin lines and when live detection is turned off. You must also have very steady hands and sufficient light when taking snapshots. I wish it were possible for the camera's flash to function while using it either as a flash or as a flashlight. However, you can get around this by taking a picture using the camera app and then accessing the camera roll from HanYou.

Unlike another reviewer's comment, I did find that HanYou is capable of recognizing terms consisting of two or more characters that are compounded. It can read vertically as well.

All in all I do recommend HanYou and look forward to further improvements. One thing I would like to see is the ability to have spoken audio for the read text.

This is an excellent idea, but as currently designed isn't very useful. It only recognizes and translates a single character at a time, which given the fact that most words and concepts in chinese are made up of two or more characters that may or may not be related to the individual characters, renders HanYou fairly useless compared to the translation ability of, say, Google Translate. Also, the camera often misreads characters, especially if they're in anything other than a very standard, typed font.

If HanYou could be improved by: (1) adding recognition of full sentences or phrases and translating all of it together, and (2) improving recognition of characters, HanYou would blow other translation apps out of the water.

HanYou is not worth the money. I thought the concept of using your camera would be great. First try though it kept giving multiple options over and over for the same writing. No specific translation. Now it doesn't give any translation with the camera and the hand written translation (you draw it in) gave a completely different translation from another app I have. The other app was free and it works better.

Impressive, and close to vital when traveling in China