Recently there was change to the learning flow so that when a new character was being learnt, if you don’t know all the components there is a screen that tells you about it. You hit “learn” and then you know why you’re learning that component.
I then realised I often desperately want this for characters too. I recently had 刻 show up and I think “I’ve never seen this and have no use for it, I’ll never discuss carving things and it’s so arbitrary why?”, then a few days later 时刻 shows up and it starts making more sense. Same with 通 in 普通话 etc. I’m honestly still not sure why some characters (ie. 挺) are in the list at all.
Obviously some of them just are “words” in their own right and aren’t there for any other reason (which I think 挺 is one, I just haven’t hit it in context yet so not 100% sure). But a significant amount of characters are only in the list because they’re part of a common word. It would be cool on the learning screen if along side “Used in Words” was a “Learning Because” section that could you check what this thing relates to.
Sadly I have a suspicion that the characters are just from the HSK3 character list so the information about WHY they’re on the list doesn’t exist. But if it does and you have it, I’d love for it to be exposed.
With the new hover-card changes, I can see this being more useful.
There is a sub-optimal flow right now which requires you to tab over to the Examples and see if you are interested in any of the words presented, if you already clicked “Learn” for that character/know all the components already.
But yeah, displaying some of the words the character is in on the “Skip” or “Learn” section would help in deciding whether to learn it or skip it
It’s somewhat this but after thinking about it it’s also broader. Right now I don’t know if this character is important for it’s own sake, or if it’s only important because of some high frequency word. If I went and looked at the words for 水 character page, it doesn’t tell me that I need to learn that because by itself it’s super important. Obviously trivial example because clearly you need to know water, but say 努 it’s non-obvious.
Today I was trying to figure out why 努 showed up in the list - haven’t seen it in any of my reading, and the definition seems like a pretty arbitrary character to throw in, but Dong Chinese Dictionary has this graph for it:
And I realise this is what I wanted. It’s super obvious why I’m learning it. I’m learning this now because of 努力. As opposed to something like 挺 from my original post where I now know I’m obviously learning it for it’s own sake rather than any word it’s contained in:
Now I know DongChinese dictionary has this, I don’t necessarily need it integrated into HH, but now I’ve found it I expect to be alt+tabbing over to check all the new characters that aren’t immediately obvious every time.
It sounds like having some sort of Frequency indicator on the hover cards, along with displaying the words the character is found in (sorted by frequency), and then sticking that onto the “skip / learn” character popup would help a lot
The only question is how to solve the UX of getting a regular character lesson.
The obvious solution is to just push the “word examples” to be the first tab, though I’m not sure how confusing that’d be compared to the status quo.
I wonder if there’s a another visual way to show the frequency of a word, beyond the graph view you have there or just having a raw number.
I think this is all a good line of questioning to answer in the UI: why am I learning this? – whether because it’s in your HSK level, or because it’s a common character, or found in a common word, etc
