About us
Hanziway began with our son's Chinese lessons. Today, we build tools to help people learn Chinese, prepare for lessons and see their progress.
We're Katerina and Dmitry: a learning materials designer and a developer, and a married couple. The two of us are behind Hanziway. We come up with ideas, debate them and decide together what it should become.
Katerina and Dmitry, the creators of Hanziway
And it all started with handwriting worksheets.
When we couldn't find the tool we needed
Our eldest son, Timofey, was three when Katerina started teaching him Chinese.
We wanted to keep his curiosity alive. To give him pictures to explore, games to play and familiar characters to recognise as he began to try writing them. To come back to the same words, but in a slightly different way each time.
It wasn't always easy to find the right materials. Some simply didn't exist; others had to be ordered from abroad at considerable expense. So Katerina started making her own.
In Word.
Our first lessons and the materials we made for them
She filled the pages with pictures, characters and activities. But changing a single element could throw the whole layout out of place. Instead of planning the lesson itself, she would find herself fixing the formatting again.
Dmitry saw how much work this took. During the winter holidays, he suggested building our own handwriting worksheet generator.
About two weeks later, the first version was ready.
Built for ourselves, shared with others
The generator let us change the content and layout of worksheets, add short activities and create finished pages without endless manual adjustments.
We didn't start with a business plan or a list of competitors' features. We had lessons to prepare, practical frustrations and a wish to make the preparation easier.
Once it worked, we decided to share it. We put the generator online and made it free to use. Teachers started using it, and we realised that plenty of other people faced the same problem we had at home.
That's how Hanziway came to be. The name brings together hanzi, the Chinese word for Chinese characters, and way, a path. The four dots beside the letter h in our logo echo the holes used to bind sheets of paper. A small detail that has stayed with us since those first worksheets.
It didn't stop at handwriting worksheets
For about four years, Hanziway was mainly a worksheet generator. We made improvements here and there, kept the site running and watched teachers use it to prepare materials.
Then we decided to take it further. The dictionary was our first major addition.
We wanted looking up a word to lead to more than a translation on a screen. You should be able to keep working with it: listen to its pronunciation, explore how it's written, save it to your own list, make worksheets or flashcards and practise with exercises.
More tools gradually grew around that idea. But the question we started with stayed the same: what does someone need during a lesson, and how can we help?
See how far you've come
When you're learning Chinese, it's easy to notice all the words you don't know yet. It's harder to keep track of everything you've already worked on: what has stuck, what still trips you up and what needs another look.
That's why My Progress matters so much to us.
In Hanziway, you mark words yourself as "Learning", "Learned" or "Review". A visual board lets you view them by HSK and YCT level, personal list or status. You can see how much vocabulary you've marked as learned, find words to revisit and choose what to work on next.
Your words, your progress and the path you've taken
Behind those marks are your lessons, your effort and your time. We wanted that work to be visible. So after a lesson, you can see not just the words still ahead, but how far you've already come.
You don't have to make everything yourself
A generator is useful when you know exactly what you want to make. Sometimes, though, you just want to open a ready-made resource and get started.
That's why Katerina creates PDF learning materials organised by HSK vocabulary level. You can buy and download them, then print the pages you need as you go.
In materials with QR codes, you can go from the printed page to a word on the site, listen to its pronunciation, check the stroke order and keep practising.
For us, paper and screens work well together. Sometimes it's useful to tap and hear a word. At other times, you want to pick up a pencil and take your time writing a character by hand.
Materials you can sit down and start learning with
The people behind Hanziway
Katerina has been studying Chinese for twenty years. She plans the content of our materials and exercises, thinking through the purpose of each activity, what it helps someone learn and how to make it clear to the learner.
Dmitry has fifteen years of experience in software development, including leading teams. He takes care of the technical side of Hanziway and works with Katerina to decide how the tools should work.
We talk through the learning idea and how to build it together. Sometimes it starts with Katerina saying, "It would be easier if this worked like this." Sometimes Dmitry suggests trying a different approach.
We care about how an activity works, whether the settings make sense, how easy a page is to read and how a printed worksheet feels in your hands. It's these details that make Hanziway what it is.
Alongside the way you learn
You might learn with a teacher, follow a textbook, take a course or study on your own. We aren't asking you to give any of that up and switch to our programme.
Hanziway helps you work with what you're learning: explore words, practise, build your own lists and track your progress. For teachers, it helps create materials suited to a particular lesson and the students in it.
We're continuing to develop the site, create new learning materials and work on a mobile app. We have plenty of ideas. As before, the most important ones often grow out of a conversation about a particular lesson: something is missing here, this takes too much manual work, or we need a way to save this and return to it easily.
It's still the two of us building Hanziway. Only now, we're thinking not just of one child, but of everyone who comes here to learn or prepare for lessons.
Katerina and Dmitry, the creators of Hanziway.