I sometimes stumble across words that are rarely used or never used at all.
For example 友愛 which my chinese friend says, they never heard in their life and I should use 友情 instead.
It is in HSK 7 I believe, but not Hanzihero.
So my question is (since I couldnt find an answer to this):
How much of the HSK Curriculum Vocab is present in HH? I am not particularly fond of learning never used words (although I get the point of combining two characters) and like to skip those but don’t want to ask my chinese friend everytime “is this word used often?”.
I hit this exact same problem of wanting to know if the things I was looking at were worth my time learning. It’s not easy to figure it with a dictionary etc (this is not just a HH issue, but with any word I found anywhere). I ended up building https://chinesefrequencydictionary.com/ to satisfy my need to know!
It lets you look up the character/word and gives you a bunch of information on how frequent it is. The SUBTLEX-CH rank of a word is the one to look at generally - it’s basically how often that word turns up in movie + TV show subtitles which very close to real spoken frequency (it’s not 100% accurate is it puts words like murder, lawyer, doctor etc really high because of all the murder mystery/hospital shows but it’s close). The 友愛 page shows that it doesn’t even get a rank in any of my lists. So this word, while it is in the dictionary, was never found a single time in any TV show/Movie … so yeah it’s useless to you outside helping you learn the characters.
But that’s actually what HH does - it doesn’t teach you to read, or to speak. It teaches you to recognise characters! You can keep 友愛 for character recognition purposes, or you can skip it because it’s a useless word outside HH.
On that note HH does contain every single character in the 2021 HSK3.0 curriculum. HH also captures most of the HSK words, but not all of them. The words HH does have are usually useful/common, but as you found out, not always. You can check out exactly what is missed/skipped here: List of missing HSK(2025) words not found in HH
Great resource! Maybe I will implement this in a tamper-monkey script to show the SUBTLEX-CH rank in HH.
I am mainly interested in filtering out words I will never use, even though I know HH does this for character recognition.
Ahh yeah - as it says on the site all my data sources are simplified, so while the dictionary search works, 幫助 isn’t in any of the frequency lists so it has no rank. Buuuut, since it found in the dictionary, and the dictionary has the matching simplified field, I hooked it up to pretend you search for the first matching simplified listing from the dictionary definition. That way it then checks the frequency info for 帮助 instead.
This won’t be 100% correct, because the mapping between simplified and traditional is not 1:1 (so the frequencies of traditional words/characters are a bit different to the frequencies for simplified ones) … but it’ll at least give you something reasonable instead of completely blank. I have NO idea how different the rankings would be, I suspect their close enough that it won’t matter, but that’s a COMPLETE GUESS! Use this data with traditional characters at your own risk!!!
The conversion on the website works pretty well.
I wrote a tampermonkey script based on the frequency of the word and it works (needs more testing though).
It is based on the SUBTLEX-CH-WF File and looks up words in the review and color codes based on the frequency. For example 表示
