🔖 Dictionary Items Beta, misc updates

[phil]

Hey folks happy to announce the Dictionary beta!

But first, some housekeeping/what’s changed.

Tile popups

This is something we’ve wanted to do for awhile. Previously the mnemonic, on hover or tap, would only give the item type.

Now if you tap on any of the key words within a mnemonic, you can get more information about it and also navigate to it by tapping on the tile.

This also works for any small icons you come across the site.

Thanks @Fregier for the suggestion!

Item Review Order

If you have a character and a related word due within the same day, it would be cool to first review the character and then do the word. This mimics how HanziHero works after all, building up by the item type.

Now you can review the items by ascending type, e.g. sounds, components, characters, words.

Check out the docs for more info.

It affects not only your Reviews, but also any Extra Study widget.

Thanks @Ahiru for this suggestion! We can look into improving it more with your other suggestions

Performance improvements, bug fixes

We’ve been cleaning up and improving load times and responsiveness where possible:

• Reduce the number of active audio elements for iOS performance
• Fix edge-case rendering issue which would cause the quiz to be unresponsive
• Improve load times with Lessons, Dashboard
• Grading accented pinyin fixes
• Restrict the arrow key when making edits to synonyms/notes

Thanks to @pedrozurawski, @kaysik and @char for reporting the bugs!

We hope to continue to clean up and make HanziHero snappier

JumpStart for Lifetime Subscribers

Those who have a Lifetime subscription now have access to JumpStart mode at any rank, which allows up to 40 lessons a day.

This gives an option to those who want to really speed through the course

Dictionary Items Beta

It can be frustrating to come across words in immersion and have no way to queue them up since they’ve yet to be integrated into our curriculum. In addition, some words just wouldn’t fit in due to pronunciation differences.
So, we’ve imported hundreds of thousands of words from CC-CEDICT which you can now queue up and review.

Enroll into the beta

You can enroll into the Dictionary beta by navigating to your application settings and toggling on the Enroll into the Dictionary Beta setting.

The above grants you access to the Dictionary search and all corresponding items.

Dictionary Search

After you enroll, you should see the “Dictionary” option in the Curriculum dropdown:

This brings you to the Dictionary Search. You can type in any pinyin, characters, or english words and we’ll provide any matches:

Queue up a word

Once you find the word you’re looking for, just navigate to its page and click the Add button, a little plus sign toward the upper right:

You can also add your own definitions, as well as set the primary definition – basically the one that shows up across the UI.

Review a Dictionary Item

After you add an item, it’s added to the front of your review pile.

It’s roughly the same as a Word Item:

There are two things we do to make reviewing these easier, in the event you don’t want to add your own definitions:

• We consider each semicolon clause within a definition
• We strip out the parentheses

Dictionary Item Popups

Where applicable we’ve also added popup support for Dictionary items:

100k+ Dictionary audio

We’ve generated over 100k mp3s for each voice we support. This makes it so you can get that audio reinforcement in your reviews, as well as check how it should be pronounced.

Took a few days to generate

Thanks to everyone that gave feedback about adding more words/words in the wild!

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Try it out if you want to help iron out any kinks – I’m looking forward to feedback and fixing up any bugs/issues

Here’s the dictionary item docs for reference/extra explanations. Let me know if you run into any confusions

Happy studying!

[kaysik]

@phil

So, we’ve imported hundreds of thousands of words from CC-CEDICT which you can now queue up and review.

This is going to be awesome, thanks heaps!

[tonibui31]

最好的軟件。

1. Will the dictionary be applied to mobile version soon?
2. If I select a word from dictionary, later on it is added to curriculum (words), will the color change to blue, and carry on all the process?

[kaysik]

@phil

After you add an item, it’s added to the front of your review pile.

I think this is unexpected and … interesting. This means dictionary words jump the whole learning step and completely bypasses the word limit etc. I personally had planned to use it to just go through the HSK word list and add all the things that are skipped due to the rule of single pronunciations (e.g. 还是 and 睡觉), but I quickly found that instantly gives me lots of reviews. So I’ll have to manually spread them out, which is a little more manual work.

I kinda like it - since sometimes I really do want to just jam it in. But I also like the idea that it’s added to the queue ane will just turn up when they turn up as a new item. Is this flow of straight to queue expected to change at all to match standard flow?

Can you link to the characters from the dictionary page? From say 睡觉 it doesn’t link me to 睡 for instance. Not huge, but would be nice to have the same popup stuff as every other page.

I also noticed it’s stripped out all single character definitions from the dictionary (or at least all the ones I checked). I’m guessing this is for simplicity but again I had planned to use the CE-Dict feature to add 还 as hai2-still and then either skip the base HH huan, or keep both just with a different colour. But I’m not able to do that currently. Since this is already for people wanting to “do their own thing” would it matter if you just left the single character words in? Too much audio to generate? Or just hoping to keep the distinction between a character and a two+ character “word” nice and strict?

(Still very happy overall - still great even as is!)

[phil]

@tonibui31

Will the dictionary be applied to mobile version soon?

It should be usable on the mobile today, unless you’re running into issues.

Oh, I see what you mean now. I don’t think there’s a link on mobile after you enroll.

I just pushed a fix. Thanks!

@tonibui31

If I select a word from dictionary, later on it is added to curriculum (words), will the color change to blue, and carry on all the process?

Good question! We decided to keep Dictionary items distinct from other items. So if we end up officially supporting a word that’s already in the Dictionary, then they’ll coexist.

The general idea is to look up the word first in the official curriculum, and then dig into the dictionary words if we don’t have it. Another thing we can do to prevent one from using the Dictionary version of an officially supported Word would be to have a little notice/link you can click on

But yeah, Dictionary Items and Word Items coexist

@kaysik

Is this flow of straight to queue expected to change at all to match standard flow?

Yeah, we want to explore this. I think there’s a lot of improvements we can make, but we wanted to put out this V1 and collect feedback. So definitely, having a limit on Dictionary words is probably desirable it helps to know that you were inclined to just queue up a bunch of words you’ve been wanting to learn.

If we were to add a limit, I think it’d be yet another setting

And as you said, some users may not like it being pushed to the front of reviews, too, maybe toward the back instead

@kaysik

Can you link to the characters from the dictionary page?

Good suggestion, I think this would be a nice improvement! It’d be useful to check out the individual characters per entry definitely.

@kaysik

would it matter if you just left the single character words in?

You’re right in that it was mostly for simplicity with this initial version
This could serve as a convenient way to cover more pronunciations of a character

Thanks for already trying it out and for the feedback!

[tonibui31]

Another thing we can do to prevent one from using the Dictionary version of an officially supported Word would be to have a little notice/link you can click on

Good idea, I think it best to avoid duplicate work on both Words and Dictionary. Or just straight up not allow adding to the queue vocabulary from Dictionary, that already existed in Words.

Although, I think it is better if we could just search vocabulary on just “Search curriculum…”. Any vocabulary that does not exist yet on Words will still be shown as Dictionary items.

Additionally, if a vocabulary is already existed in Words, when I choose to add in Dictionary, it would be better if there is button to remove the chosen word, instead of currently only having the skipped option.

[Adri]

Hi, is it possible to automatically prioritize unknown characters when we add a new word from the dictionary?

[bmeri]

This is seriously one of the coolest updates ever. Unlimited SRS at your fingertips, all in HanziHero. Very nice.

Only two things I would really like to see added:

• If you search a term that already exists in HanziHero, it should provide a link to that term’s page. Possibly including warning validation when adding these terms (“Are you sure you want to add this dictionary term to your reviews? It already exists in HanziHero. You’ll get to it eventually!”)

• The ability to filter dictionary terms by known hanzi. So, if I knew 3 of the 4 hanzi in 条幅广告, it would show up as 75%.

[kevin]

Thanks for all the feedback so far. We are reading all of your responses here as well through our other support channels as we begin to prioritize and plan the next set of changes we can make to improve this new beta feature! Keep them coming.

[tonibui31]

I would also like to add that both Dictionary and Search Curriculum should be able to search by 汉字。（Dictionary cannot be searched with, Curriculum rarely do).

感谢你们。

[kaysik]

After playing with this some more I’ve decided I really do want dictionary words to be treated like existing HH words functionality wise. This means getting added to the queue when you click the + (like prioritise), and also having their characters added to the queue if not already learnt (exactly like how prioritising an existing word would work).

There are two reasons for this: Firstly, it’s just consistency. If you prioritise a normal HH word, you learn the characters first - it should work the same way for dictionary world (obviously assuming those characters exist in the system). This way I can add like 50+ dictionary words at once without it completely wrecking my SRS queue, and without having to manually time when to prioritise characters so they show up before the dictionary word. Jumping a word right into the review queue is a more rare use case than just adding it as a prioritised item in the queue (at least in my case).

Secondly, if this did work consistently, it opens a clear path to word lists. I would love to be able to make a list of words I know how to say and have it just automatically flow through the system. Just a text box with “1 word per line” and bham it’ll throw it all into the system and slowly burn through them without needing to manually go find and prioritise them + their characters. The people wanting to follow the older HSKv2 path could also then just have a word list for that. I’m sure there are people out there who’d love a word list for specific TV shows and I hope one day to get to that level myself.

Now obviously one major benefit to HH is the order of teaching tries to go simple → complex, so maybe within a list it still sorts/teaches them to you in the HH order rather than the original list order or something else smart. I’m sure it’s not nearly as simple to implement as it seems on the surface. But the idea of word lists greatly interests me and if the flow for dictionary items was consistent it seems like it’d make adding word lists significantly smoother.

[phil]

@kaysik

know how to say and have it just automatically flow through the system. Just a text box with “1 word per line” and bham it’ll throw it all into the system and slowly burn through them without needing to manually go find and prioritise them

This sounds like a really cool and effective way to leverage the prioritization system! It does seem like prioritization is difficult to take advantage of because of the manual process behind it also, the queue is FIFO and not too flexible

@kaysik

getting added to the queue when you click the + (like prioritise), and also having their characters added to the queue

Yeah, you’ve some strong arguments for moving the dictionary items over to the queue instead of dumping them into reviews. It seems like it’s super easy to accidentally dump a lot of extra reviews because “adding dictionary items” is more of a batch-process after all

Thanks for all the great feedback!

[kaysik]

@phil

the queue is FIFO and not too flexible

Firstly, I fully acknowledge I have no knowledge of your back-end/tech stack so my thoughts might be completely useless.

However assuming you did have the word lists importer, I think you can still use the existing FIFO prioritised queue by sorting the words first. Could probably even let users choose if they want their own order or the HH order. If they import with the “nah use my order” selected, it just adds the words straight into the FIFO queue. If however you select the “Learn in HH order” option, all it needs to do is pre-sort the list of words into the HH order first, then add them to the FIFO queue in the sorted order. The fact the prioritisation queue is FIFO doesn’t matter since the words/characters are already in the correct order. It then wouldn’t break any existing functionality with how people prioritise things now. The FIFO queue doesn’t need to know/care about the order inside itself, but if you want to mass import a list and prefer the HH order you can.

[daposto]

Happy to see progress on this great product! Thanks a lot!! One question I just tried out the sorting on sounds, components etc. But it appeared they were somewhat in order but I quicky seemed to get them out of order again. Perhaps the sorting due to SRS? Bit it happened quite quick were I got components before sounds, or characters before components.