About Youyin

Youyin(卣囙/yǒuyīn) is a simple platform for practicing hanzi/kanji/hanja/汉字/漢字 and/or other writing systems.

We use a simple flashcard based approach to learning to read, write and understand the given writing system. These are the components of the app:

  1. Learning - A page filled with tips for new language learners
  2. Practice - Helps you learn to read and write the given character
  3. Deck marketplace - A large list of community and official decks that can be imported on demand

The app is not a dictionary, the user is supposed to use a separate dictionary(like pleco for Chinese)

The story of the app's development

In January 2023 Stanislav Vasilev(Madman10K) decided to create Youyin because he was already learning Chinese and found remembering to write the characters hard. He found no existing solution that would help with that, so he decided to develop one himself. Initially started as a platform for learning to write Chinese characters, Youyin is currently expanding into more writing systems like Hiragana, Katakana, Hangul, Cyrillic, Latin, Greek, Georgian, Armenian, Arabic and more.

The name Youyin comes from a bad joke about the videogame Among us where people all over the internet were going insane when they saw the geometric shape of the crewmates in the game. In Chinese the name uses the 2 symbols "卣囙" pronounced as "yǒuyīn" in pinyin, which kind of look like the crewmates. Additionally the name of the site is similar to the following 3 words:

  1. 诱因 - meaning cause esp. of an illness, it's related to the site because you'll become sick of "I know how to write so much Chinese characters" syndrome
  2. 油印 - meaning a mimeograph, a device for copying text and images to another list of paper, related because you will be copying handwriting here a lot
  3. 有瘾 - meaning to be addicted to something, relevant because you'll be addicted to writing characters here

The pair 卣囙 doesn't mean anything, the first character is an archaic word for a "small-mouthed wine vessel", while the second is an old variand of the character 因, which generally means, cause, origin, to follow, to carry on, to conform to, to accord with, because of, as a result of, because.

Credits

Youyin uses the following open source libraries for most of the testing and text rendering functionality, most of the yearly revenue of the site after maintenance costs gets donated to those 2 projects:

  1. Makemeahanzi - Provides the character information used by Hanziwriter
  2. Hanziwriter - Provides the character animations and handwriting recognition used during tests

Addtionally, we want to thank the following people for helping with the development of the application:

  1. Hristian Rusev for providing German translations
  2. Neyko Naydenov for providing Japanese translations

Known issues

Start session button or writer becomes really large

Q: When I resize the window or finish a test, the start session button or the writer becomes really large, why is that?

A: Unfortunarely, this peculiar error cannot be resolved by us, because it's mainly caused by third party extensions. One example is Grammarly. The only way to stop that from happening is to find out which extension causes this and disable it for our site.