BrushPath · Blog

What TOFU Learn got wrong, and what BrushPath does about it

9 November 2026 · Khay

TOFU Learn was the app that taught me to write Chinese characters, and it's the reason BrushPath exists. The story of how is in Why I built BrushPath. This post is the practical half: the problems TOFU had, which its users had been pointing out for years, and what BrushPath does instead. If you're looking for a TOFU Learn alternative now that it's gone, this is what I built to replace it.

It lived on a server

Everything in TOFU lived on their server: your decks, your progress, the writing practice itself. When the server went down, and it went down for days at a time more than once, you were locked out of all of it. When the company went quiet and the app was pulled from the stores in February 2025, everything went with it.

BrushPath keeps everything on your phone. The stroke data for every character ships with the app, your progress lives in a database on the device, and nothing is fetched while you study. If the BrushPath website went dark tomorrow, the app would carry on exactly as it does today. There are no accounts to create and no passwords to forget. Your decks export as plain text you can open in Pleco, Anki or a spreadsheet, and a whole deck can be shared as a link. What you've learned is yours.

It asked you to grade yourself

Most flashcard apps ask you to rate yourself: did you know that one, yes or no? TOFU did too, in some of its modes. And most of us, most of the time, say yes.

BrushPath doesn't ask. You write the character on the screen, the app watches the strokes, in order, and decides for you. A clean character scores high and comes back later. A fumbled one scores low and comes back tomorrow. You can't kid yourself that you know something you don't, which is exactly what I'd been doing for years.

It punished you for coming back

Anyone who has used a spaced repetition app knows what happens when you miss a couple of weeks. You open it and there are 300 reviews waiting, and the honest reaction is to close it again. That number kills more attempts than anything else.

BrushPath doesn't show it. Come back after a week or more away and the home screen says welcome back, with one button: ease back in. The pile gets spread over the coming days at your usual sitting size, oldest first, so you do 15 today and 15 tomorrow rather than 300 now. While you're catching up, a word you slip on gets its interval halved instead of reset to zero, because forgetting a bit after a break isn't the same as never knowing it. And no new words are added until you're clear. Coming back is never a punishment.

It was one app among several

When I study I switch between different apps and different translators. One for writing, another for reading, a dictionary somewhere else, a translator for the sentence the dictionary couldn't manage. They all have a feature I might want, and it's annoying having to juggle several apps.

BrushPath puts those things in one place: writing with stroke order, and a built-in dictionary of around 100,000 words. Type a word in characters, pinyin or English, paste a message, or photograph a menu, and anything it finds can go straight into a deck you write from. Graded stories to read and then write from are next.

It treated every learner as a beginner

Most characters are made of parts, a meaning part and a sound part, and once you can see them a character stops being a drawing and becomes a word with a structure. BrushPath shows you the parts of every character and what each one does.

For Cantonese speakers it shows the Cantonese reading next to the Mandarin one. If you grew up speaking Cantonese, a huge share of "new" vocabulary isn't new at all. You've said the word for years; you've just never seen it written. Putting the Cantonese reading beside the character turns that moment of recognition from an accident into the way you learn.

Who it's for

Beginners, who get the first level free. Heritage speakers, who already know how a word sounds and have never been shown how it's written. Anyone who wants to read as well as write, and to know how each stroke is made, in order. BrushPath is coming to Google Play, with iPhone to follow.