HanYou - Chinese Dictionary app for iPhone and iPad

4.4 ( 1664 ratings )

Travel Education Reference
Developer: Nomad AI OU

Free

Current version: 5.3.5, last update: 3 months ago
First release : 19 Sep 2014
App size: 234 Mb

HanYou, your Chinese learning companion. The app you need to become fluent in Mandarin or Cantonese

HanYou is an offline Chinese dictionary, translator and optical recognizer designed to help you read, speak and learn Chinese.

HanYous dictionary is extensive, fast, and delivers Chinese word details into more than 20 target languages. You can input words in any language, alphabet, or by drawing. In particular, find relevant definitions and Chinese-English translations whether you learn Chinese for fun or prepare for the HSK.

HanYous powerful offline Optical Character Recognition (OCR) engine can recognize more than 13 000 Chinese characters in your pictures or with your device camera.

HanYou helps you improve your Chinese with flashcards. Flashcards are a powerful and enjoyable way to learn new words. Based on your learning statistics, you will be shown everyday a deck of flashcards tailored for you.

HanYou features advanced Chinese text analysis. Paste or write some Chinese text and the text analyzer will break sentences into words and display their pinyins.

Unique social feature: whenever you have trouble with some Chinese, you can always ask a question or post a picture on the HanYou wall. HanYous users, from beginner to advanced level, will come to help you.

DICTIONARY:
• More than 20 target languages available: English, Japanese, German, French, Hungarian, Thai, Italian, Arabic, Korean and more
• Search Chinese words from in any kind of input: Traditional / Simplified / Pinyins / Jyutping (Cantonese)
• Listen to the Mandarin and Cantonese pronunciation of words and sentences through the "Speak" function
• You can also search the other way and input foreign words in the search bar
• Handwriting Recognition
• Intuitive Radical search
• Search words that either start with / end with / contain the query word
• More than 10 thousands example sentences built from various sources
• Build vocabulary lists of Chinese words (which you can share as files or text in many ways)

OPTICAL CHARACTER RECOGNITION (OCR):
• A powerful Optical Character Recognition (OCR) engine which lets you translate Chinese characters in images
• HanYou recognizes more that 13000 Chinese characters
• HanYou recognizes both Traditional and Simplified characters
• You can recognize Chinese text with your Live Camera or on Still Pictures (from your camera roll)
• Read either horizontal or vertical Chinese text

STUDY WITH FLASHCARDS:
• You can learn words in a fun way with flashcards. Pick up any deck from the pre-built lists or from your own lists and history, then start learning them with flashcards
• Everyday, a new deck is built based on your learning statistics in order to optimise your memorising power

TEXT READER:
• Paste some text, or import it from the OCR modes, into the text analyzer to get definitions of each word in the text
• Pinyins are also displayed automatically
• Listen to the Chinese text with the "Speak" function

OPEN SAFARI WEB PAGES:
• In Safari, tap the "Share / Export" button to open the web page in HanYou. All Chinese words will be added pinyin and you will be able to tap on each of them to have a popup definition

HANYOU WALL:
• Get help from the user community by sharing pictures on the HanYou Wall

We are very responsive to your feedback and suggestions: [email protected]

Pros and cons of HanYou - Chinese Dictionary app for iPhone and iPad

HanYou - Chinese Dictionary app good for

Its a truly amazing app! A must-have for foreigners who live in or travel often to China.

Very useful app for learning Chinese or traveling to China. Very easy to use and the results are great with good translation. It is very cool to be able to translate Chinese characters in real-time. The drawing mode is also super useful to practice and remember the characters. Awesome app!

Some bad moments

Frustrating. Does not recognize text and phrases properly. Not worth it.

I am a previous user of Yomiwa (the Japanese counterpart of HanYou), 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!

This is an excellent idea, but as currently designed isnt 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 the app fairly useless compared to the translation ability of, say, Google Translate. Also, the camera often misreads characters, especially if theyre in anything other than a very standard, typed font. If the app could be improved by: (1) adding recognition of full sentences or phrases and translating all of it together, and (2) improving recognition of characters, this app would blow other translation apps out of the water.

Living close to Chinatown in SF and having tried multiple classes to read chinese without any success, i am stoked to find this app. It reads really well store fronts, ads on MUNI (the bus). I am having a lot of fun and actually can decipher stuff. Now i even start to remember characters and their meanings. Thanks Han You

Super helpful and easy to use. Highly recommend for Chinese learners and travelers to China alike !!

OCR is always a tricky thing. This app 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 cameras 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 this app. Unlike another reviewers comment, I did find that this app 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 this app and look forward to further improvements. One thing I would like to see is the ability to have spoken audio for the read text.

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