Hanly review: price, free version and privacy

Our verdict

Hanly is a smart, inexpensive add-on for anyone whose main problem is remembering characters. It does not replace a course, a reader or a dictionary app like Pleco.

What Hanly is

Hanly teaches Chinese characters by their structure. It starts with simple components and builds to complex characters, introducing the most frequent ones early, and gives each character an etymology, an illustration and a mnemonic. A searchable dictionary shows meanings, pronunciations, HSK level, frequency, radicals, stroke order animations and historical forms. Spaced repetition is built into the interface, so known characters are marked wherever they appear.

Who it suits

• Learners who struggle to remember Chinese characters
• Students who want to understand radicals and components

Strengths

• Breaks each character into components, shown as a tree in the screenshots
• Etymology with oracle, bronze and seal script forms
• Built-in spaced repetition and a searchable character dictionary with HSK levels
• Low price and no tracking declared

Limits

• Characters only: no speaking, listening, grammar or reading of full texts
• A young app, released in February 2025, with about 412 ratings
• English-only interface
• The listing does not say what is free or the billing period of Premium

What the free version does

The app is free to download, but the listing does not say how many characters or features are available before Premium.

Price

Hanly Premium is listed at $5.99 on the US App Store in November 2026, the only item in the price list. The item name does not give a billing period.

Privacy

The privacy label declares no tracking. Contact info and usage data are collected but not linked to your identity.

What the screenshots show

The screenshots show a card for 火 (huǒ, fire) explaining that it evolved from a drawing of fire, with tabs for oracle, bronze and seal scripts, and a composition tree for 照 broken into 昭 and 灬, then into 日, 召, 刀 and 口.