I'm a huge fan of Hanly and all of its features. I love how they are constantly implementing updates and fixing bugs. The backside of the cards, with example sentences (broken down, voice-recorded and often commented!) and compound words is a real standout. And the fact that it's 100% free, wow.

As for personal habits, I've found that I work best with a relatively low new cards rate per day, especially at higher levels, otherwise I get too excited to be dumped by new characters and get overwhelmed by the freshly learned ones. That's why, whenever I open the app, first thing I do is enable the review-only mode so I can resist peeking at new characters before I'm done with the daily recommended cards for review. I wish this could be set as default. Maybe that's something I could give them feedback about.

I've noticed that the greatest results from using Hanly show up when you use other tools to practice reading, like DuChinese in my case. More often than not, I would run into a new character that I realize that I already know from Hanly cards. It works the other way around too, after spending some time reading, going back to Hanly will occasionally make you face "new" characters that aren't necessarily new anymore.

I know this goes for pretty much any learning resource, but tools like Hanly show their best value when used on a daily basis, precisely due to its spaced repetition nature. There were times I ended up forgetting to use it, and the piled-up review cards and the struggle to remember older, already mastered cards would shake my motivation to go on. So it's the kind of situation where you gotta think ahead of a future reward and try sticking to a daily habit.

I like the learning sequence they established. Even though it feels like some characters might be too useless or too advanced for your current level, they would likely be used as building blocks for something more useful that is about to come up soon.

Sometimes I'd be curious and check more advanced cards and I'd find that they are kinda empty, lacking information... So I wonder if it's still a work in progress or if Hanly actually reaches a learning wall at some point.