20 odd days left in the year, 140 odd characters left to finish HSK6. I can’t help but drop words or even reviews on the race to finish line. Anyone else making poor and counterproductive decisions?
UPDATE: So, obviously, I rushed through the whole list with lots of time to spare. And obviously it’s a terrible idea and you shouldn’t do it. I reckon it’ll take me until mid-January to get the reviews down to something reasonable.
But, it’s not going to add that much more time to the process. And, it means I can relax over Christmas, without worrying about arbitrary goals.
So, not recommending or regretting this course of action.
Well, I think part of it is that I’ll be changing things up in the new year and focusing more on speaking/reading/listening - which I neglected this year. I’ll keep doing my reviews and new words, but probably no new characters for a few months
I definitely feel you on the part of study methods that have been neglected for me. That’s also speaking, listening, reading and writing. I think I’ve kind of just been sticking to learning characters and words through this app which isn’t bad because at least it’s keeping me at the basic somewhat learning level where I’m not just completely doing nothing. But, for 2025 I definitely want to engage more in active practice.
For the word selection algorithm, we currently prioritize words primarily according to how many related words you learned for a given character, then secondarily by HSK level. So if you already learned many words that contain 车, then e.g., 车子 will be prioritized lower so you can learn more words that contain characters you haven’t learned any words for yet.
The current way to counteract this is to increase the number of word lessons per day in the application settings. Or to manually prioritize words that you really want to learn.
However, in the near future we hope to add a setting that will make it so the lesson queue aggressively prioritizes any words at or below the rough HSK level you are at, regardless of how well you already know the characters within them, at the expense of having a bit less character lessons until all those HSK words are learned. This will give users another way of adjusting the word/character balance that they get in their lessons.
This is likely due to the character unlocking setting being set to “Unlock when dependent items are familiar”, which will make it so the last couple of characters won’t show up in Lessons until the components within them reach a certain SRS stage.
(The default for this setting now for is “Unlock when dependent items are learned” which makes it so characters can be learned immediately after their components are learned, instead of needing to wait for those components to be reviewed a couple times to build familiarity).
@kevin Can you elaborate a bit on how the Hanzi Hero level is calculated? I have been seeing in my own studys that each HSK level is ~10 HH Levels. I was just noticing in the screenshot posted that OP is only a few levels higher than me but is already onto HSK 7-9. Does this have to do with the words learned as well versus just the characters? I have been sticking to the reccomended 13 words 7 characters for the 20 per day workload.
Thank you Kevin! I think ‘unlock when dependent items are familiar’ makes sense from an actual learning perspective. I’ve noticed before that it gets a little fuzzy around the end of each HSK level though, which can be demotivating (for, like, half a day)
User level is (currently) just a cosmetic number. It is determined by the number of characters one is familiar with (familiarity being defined as successfully reviewing it a couple times). Words are not (currently) taken into account for it at all. We’ve wanted to do more with it (along with e.g., adding achievement badges etc), but it’s priority has been lower than other things we are working on.
