About BrushPath

I grew up speaking Cantonese and never learned to read it. Before a trip to Shanghai to meet my girlfriend's parents, I set myself a modest target: to get around the city on my own, which today means using Alipay, WeChat, Didi and the rest, all of them in characters. The thing that finally worked was writing characters by hand, a few minutes at a time, several times a day. Reading followed, and once I could read, listening and speaking got easier.

The app I learned with disappeared, so I built BrushPath to replace it. You write each character on the screen and the app grades the strokes, in order, so you can't tell yourself you knew one when you didn't. A clean character comes back later. A fumbled one comes back tomorrow. It shows you how each character is built from its parts, and for Cantonese speakers it shows the Cantonese reading beside the Mandarin one.

It's for beginners, and it's for heritage speakers who already know how a word sounds and have never been shown how it's written. The first level is free. The longer story is in Why I built BrushPath.

BrushPath is made by ColonSlash in the UK. Write to [email protected].