I already know around 300 words and 1-2 years ago also learned the first 500 Characters from remembering the hanzi. So if instead of only 20 new items a day I could do maybe 40 or so for some time until I reach a point where I get to learn more new characters I don’t know yet, that would be quite beneficial. Remember lots of people who start using hanzihero are probably not completely newcomers to mandarin.
Thanks for reading.
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Throwing in my 2 cents here as another user.
I think that’s better solved by a skip character feature or skip to HSK level feature. IMO the risk of increasing the cap isn’t worth the harm. 20 items on an SRS platform really is a lot to consistently do. Even Matt from Japan, who was doing like 5-10 hours of study a day only added 10 cards per day. The risk would be that some users would push the cap thinking they could handle it, maybe do well for a few weeks or month, get swamped with reviews and quit. I would like to see the Admin’s reasoning.
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Yeah that is the gist of the reasoning. Right now we don’t have any features for resetting progress on a more granular level (we just have a curriculum-wide reset), which we want to have in place before opening up a greater degree of “lessons per day” functionality.
Right now we do have the recently added Prioritization feature, which one can use to prioritize unknown characters they want to learn. We have a skip feature (or “mass prioritization”) in the backlog, but unsure when we will get to it.
I definitely understand the complaint, and I tend to think about this issue every week trying to find the best way to solve it, so I can share some other thoughts I have on the matter:
- I started doing HanziHero after I already knew ~1.5k characters, was regularly reading Chinese manga an hour or two a day, and could understand ~95% of the dubbed anime I watched. Despite that, I still found immense value out of cementing those 1.5k characters I “knew” (but not deeply) over the course of a couple months.
- Related to the above, any “skip” feature we do add, we need to make it flexible enough for users to unskip items that are in e.g., HSK 2, that they thought they knew but later found that they didn’t know quite that well.
- For the OP case specifically, catching up to the ~500 characters from RTH already learned (though there is a very good chance you may not know the pronunciation if you went through the method as the author recommends you to) is under two months of work at 20 lessons a day. When set against the fact that learning all characters one needs to know in Chinese takes years, it does not seem that bad.
I appreciate the feedback. Adding more flexibility on lesson/day, skipping, etc are all things on our roadmap that we hope to get to soon, there is just a lot of ground work we need to lay first.
I was in the exact same boat when I started, and was especially annoyed at the 20 items/day limit when at the beginning they all were sounds (which I already had my own mnemonics for) and components (which I already mostly knew from WaniKani).
Eventually it wasn’t too bad. Once I got over the first 2 weeks, I really appreciated cementing hanzi I already knew (especially cementing their tones), like @kevin says. For this reason, after going through it, I’m not a big fan of the option to skip or jump to HSK level (especially for hanzi, skipping sounds, components or even words could be ok).
On the other hand, like @lorentz says, a higher limit becomes unsustainable. I’ve been doing 20 items since I started 3 and a half months ago, but I will soon drop to 10 or less (especially because a lot of vocab is missing and 20 new hanzi per day is way too much, and because I assume my review will go way up when my gold items start popping up again to go to platinum).
That said, the risk of users quitting the app because the beginning is too slow is also there. Because of that, for me the best possible solution would be to allow for a daily limit increase for a short period in the beginning (maybe first two weeks?). This could allow some motivated users a more exciting start and help them get to more hanzi first, and by the time the cap would go down to 20 they would probably already have a good but manageable amount of reviews.
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I’m only 12 days into the course so far and I haven’t changed the daily cap from 10. In the first few days, I wanted to do more reviews but I get about 50 reviews per day now which (for me anyway) is about the right level - not too little and I certainly wouldn’t want (e.g.) double that which I imagine may happen if I raised the daily cap to 20.
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This is just to give you an idea of how easy it is to underestimate the workload:
At 12 days, you have items with 1 day, 2 day, 4 day, intervals coming in everyday (1 week isn’t possible yet b/c 1+2+4+7= 14 > 12). So when you are about 100 days in like me, you will have 6 SRS stages coming in. There are 8 SRS stages total except for the finished items, so you’d almost see your current numbers triple eventually ~8months.
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That’s a good idea about allowing the limit to be raised at the beginning. For the first X hanzi learned probably, then resetting back to 20. We’ll definitely consider that!
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