📖 New Lessons flow now default

HanziHero Announcements
1

Hey folks, hope all has been well :slight_smile:

Thank you to those who gave feedback during the new lessons flow beta, it’s much appreciated!
After some feedback and iterating we’re ready to make this the default experience.

In this announcement I’ll go over again what the new lessons flow looks like for those trying it out the first time :+1:

Preview the Character you’re about to learn

Screenshot 2024-07-28 at 19.32.28
Screenshot 2024-07-28 at 19.32.281077×1001 40.7 KB

When loading into a new Lessons session, you’ll be greeted with a new screen which:

  1. Details all of the prerequisites needed to learn a character
  2. Asks you whether you want to learn it or skip it

This makes it so you understand why you’re learning certain sounds and components, as well as give an option to avoid a character you already know.

Dynamically queues up prerequisites as needed

queue-up

When you decide to learn a character, you’ll get any unknown sounds and components of that character and learn them within the same session. What this means is that the “Character Unlocking” preferences is no longer relevant, because you’ll always learn the sounds and components along with the character.

New Confirmation Tab

confirm-tab

With any item you’re learning you’ll now have a “confirmation” section which checks if you got the needed information in your short term memory. This hopefully helps with getting things into your memory and having it stick, rather than going through X amount of lessons and quizzing them all at once.

Skip any time you want

skip-whenever

If you come across any item you don’t want to learn, you can always skip it. If you skip a character or a word during your lessons, a new one will be queued up in its place.

Overflow lesson batching

overflow

To make sure you learn the character, the lesson batch size will “overflow” as needed, which you can note in the top right of the above example, as it overflows to -3. This avoids the case where you learned all the prerequisites of a character but came short to learning the character itself!

With this announcement we’ve made this the default experience and turned it on for all users.
In the next couple of weeks we plan to rip out the previous experience.
In the mean time, you still have access to it within your settings:

Screenshot 2024-07-28 at 19.59.13
Screenshot 2024-07-28 at 19.59.131077×1001 61.5 KB

That’s it – thanks again for all the feedback, and happy studying!

3 Likes
2

I like the new lesson flow, but it would be nice to default accept all new characters. I don’t think I’ll be skipping anything, so the extra step feels redundant.

4 Likes
3

I would like to echo what Robocan said. I would also like to add that I like skipping components when there is a character with the same meaning and the character looks identical to the component.

2 Likes
4

I was planning on staying with the previous flow, so it’s quite unfortunate it’s going to be ripped out.

  • To me, after all this time and my previous experience with WK, the extra confirmation step feels cumbersome (and I especially that it has a different behavior than reviews/quiz lesson, in which I need to press enter twice).

  • I would’ve loved to have the Learn/Skip option when I started out but at this point I also don’t plan on skipping any items, so that will also be an added unnecessary step.

  • I’m also sad that the item unlocking preferences are no longer relevant, as I have always kept the option of “Unlock when dependent items are familiar”. I’ve never seen the point of learning the component and the hanzi in the same lesson, to me it defeats the purpose of learning components.

I assume taking away the previous flow is a technical matter as it is easier to maintain one flow, but if there was a way to do that or add more options to customize the lesson experience it would be great.

3 Likes
5

Thanks all for the feedback. :pray:

For the learn/skip screen, I think one first big improvement we can make is to not show it at all if there are no new components/sounds to learn for the given character. We’ll look into this further this week. (edit: this is now implemented :partying_face: , see Phil’s post below)

Given that the purpose of the learn/skip screen is specifically to avoid teaching components/sounds when the user doesn’t want to learn any characters that “require” them, it doesn’t serve its purpose when there are no new sounds/components to learn for the character. This is also the more common case once the first couple hundred characters are learned, so this simple change should roughen this sharp edge significantly by reducing how often this screen shows up.

For item unlocking preferences, there may be ways for us to continue to respect them even in the new flow. We’ll look into how feasible this is in the coming weeks.

:construction_worker_man:

2 Likes
6

Awesome, thank you!! :pray:

1 Like
7

Update:

The new Lessons flow now skips over the learn/skip screen if you already know all the prerequisites :+1:

3 Likes
8

[Bug Report]

Had an experience today where I clicked into a learning session and there was only one item left for me to learn. Turns out it was something I already knew so I clicked skip but, while the word had been skipped, the new item did not populate in the lesson workflow until I did a refresh.

I’m guessing it may have to do with the edge case of only having a single item left to study? Also could be coincidence and I had bad internet etc.

Happy to do these in a dedicated thread if it makes it easier for you guys. Let me know.

Best,

Michael

2 Likes
9

Thanks for the report! We’ll look into this.

1 Like
10

I have a strange bug during the review session now.
The very first word is now pronounced by the voice when opening a session, and not only after correct input.

1 Like
11

Thanks for letting me know!

I think I found the reason why and pushed some changes. Let me know if it still persists :+1:

1 Like
12

Wait maybe I misunderstood what skip does - I thought it was for skipping the character/vocab. I would assume most people would use the skip feature for characters/vocab they already know.

1 Like
13

Yeah, reviews are fixed now.
But I think I have now the opposite problem XD
The first word in lessons sessions now is not voiced when it is showed.

1 Like
14

Skipping can be done for any of the item types (characters, components, sounds, words). However, for most item types it is just a button in the top-left corner without any explicit learn/skip prompting by the application.

Only characters that have unlearned/unskipped components and sounds will show the “learn or skip this character?” screen. We do this to avoid putting components/sounds into the lesson queue until they are necessary.

I think this is best demonstrated with an example scenario:

Let’s assume User A wants to learn all item types, but maybe already knows a handful of the most common characters already and wants to skip those. If we do things the old way, they will get lessons in this order:

  1. Component A
  2. Component B
  3. Sound C
  4. Sound D
  5. Character E
  6. Component F
  7. Component G
  8. Sound H
  9. Character J

And so on. If we assume they know the first 20 characters and want to skip those, then their first ~100 lessons will ONLY be components/sounds. As the components and sounds come up in their lessons, they learn them, and the characters that come up they all skip. Then they begin to wonder when they will finally get to learn characters they actually need to learn!

To solve this, we added the “learn or skip” screen. Going back to the same scenario, their initial lesson queue instead looks like so:

  1. Character A
  2. Character B
  3. Character C
  4. Character D
  5. …
  6. Character X

Any that they don’t want to learn they can skip directly without having to learn the component/sounds quite yet. When they come across Character X, the one they want to learn, they can click “Learn”. Once they do that, we will then insert the related unlearned/unskipped components and sounds into the queue directly in front of the character. They then learn the components, sounds, and character at the same time within that lesson batch.

Bringing it back to the earlier comment, if a user already knows all components/sounds for a character, there is no need to show the learn/skip screen as there are no prerequisites to learn that could ‘clog up’ the queue. We can just show the character lesson directly, and they can click ‘skip’ on it if they don’t want to learn it. This is now what we do.

1 Like
15

LOVE the new confirmation tab when learning!!

4 Likes
16

The older v1 Lessons flow has now been removed in order to pave the way for some newer features.

We have incorporated most feedback into the V2 lesson flow, such as making it respect character unlocking settings that the V1 lesson flow already did.

As always, we are welcome to any additional feedback on the new flow, which you can give us by emailing us, messaging us, or by creating a new thread here in the forum :slight_smile:

3 Likes
17

As we learn or review items, will it be possible to have the sound option as well as the meaning, for correctly answered cards? The process in my brain will benefit with seeing the final card inclusive of hanzi, meaning and pronunciation (sound). At the moment the sound is only played with pronunciation card, but there is no option to hear it again in the ‘meaning’ card.

1 Like
18

Sorry, I 've just discovered that I can change the order of cards in settings to meaning first and pronunciation after. I am trying that today. I think that is what I am after. Thanks.

2 Likes