⏩ Skip characters, daily word limit, misc updates

[phil]

Hey everyone, hope all has been well

Here’s a quick update:

Skip characters

Previously for those that felt they already knew a good bunch of characters, they would have to go through those characters again unless they took advantage of Character Prioritization.

An issue with Character Prioritization though is that, unless you’re immersing in the language, you don’t know what you don’t know! One could hunt around on the list pages for unfamiliar looking characters and prioritize them, but this could be a tedious process.

Thus, we now have Character skipping as an option.

When you skip a character, it won’t show up in your lessons or reviews. In addition, it’ll be counted as familiar, so you still get access to words which include it

To skip a character, just navigate to the character page and click on the Skip button

Read more about it within the docs.

Daily word limit

Sometimes one may want to focus more on words or more on characters, depending what your objectives are. Instead of a hardcoded limit on words, now there’s an option to choose how many words you’d like to learn each day.

With the above settings, one can expect a maximum of 10 words a day, if there are words available to learn

Read more about it here.

Item state across the app

One glaring issue I noticed recently was that one couldn’t know the status of an item in certain contexts. By status I mean whether the item is unknown, learned, prioritized, (and now skipped )

So, for example, if you were on a word page, there wasn’t any way to know the status of the characters without clicking on each one individually.
This is no longer the case:

All of the statuses will now be reflected within the icon where applicable.
This is also true for the lessons/reviews:

Highlighted sound explanations

Previously all of the sounds had no highlighting, which didn’t make much sense seeing as all of the other items had highlighting within their mnemonics So we added highlighting to the sound explanations, making it clear how the sound item will show up in future mnemonics:

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That’s all for now, happy studying!

[lorentz]

Awesome updates all around. I really like the option to increase the word count especially.

@phil

All of the statuses will now be reflected within the icon where applicable.
This is also true for the lessons/reviews:

I can see unknown, learned, and skipped can be mutually exclusive. But how does this work with prioritized? (I think) in the past you’d see this symbol for characters that were previously prioritized and now learned, which kinda seems unnecessary (why should you care if an item learned 30 days ago was prioritized). Is that still the intended behavior? I feel like the prioritization should be marked before learning something.

[damia]

This is awesome!
One question: like @lorentz, one of the thing I was waiting for the most was increasing word count limit, as I’d like to be able to catch up on words for hanzi I already know whenever a new batch of vocab is added.
Is there a reason why the daily word limit still only lets me select 15 words instead of the 20 of my daily lesson limit? Seems a bit strange.

[Tom]

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[kevin]

Right now we have a proportional limit for maximum words to minimize the case where a user does all words for a while until the available ones are exhausted, which would then transition into getting a large amount of character lessons per day until those characters are in turn familiar allowing more word lessons to enter the queue. In other words, to make it more even keel. We may revisit this as we refine the feature.

[kevin]

@lorentz

(I think) in the past you’d see this symbol for characters that were previously prioritized and now learned, which kinda seems unnecessary (why should you care if an item learned 30 days ago was prioritized). Is that still the intended behavior? I feel like the prioritization should be marked before learning something.

That’s a good point, I’m also unsure of the current behavior. I filed a ticket to look into it as I agree that the intended behavior is what you outlined.

[phil]

@lorentz

Is that still the intended behavior?

It isn’t the intended behavior, but there was one part of the application that wasn’t handling it correctly, the Course Progress widget this has since been fixed

[damia]

But for me, since I’m already on characters that don’t have vocab, that’s exactly what I would like to do. The sooner there’s words available for characters I’m familiar with, the sooner I want to add them to my pool of reviews. I would always want to prioritize words in my lesson schedule.

I guess I don’t understand why implement a proportional limit in a feature that’s about customizing the limit.
Especially when there’s no limit on the other side and I can put it to 0.

[kevin]

You raise a good point. We’ll think about this a bit more, probably removing the limit and instead having a small warning text about repercussions of configuring to either 0 or 20. As always, thanks for the feedback

[kevin]

We have now removed the proportional limit.

[damia]

Awesome, thank you!!

[mikefernandez]

I tend to use the percent coverage widget a lot to track how my progress is going with character learning and the last day or two I was scratching my head a bit because I thought I would have hit 100% already on the HSK 2 characters (I did WOOHOO!) but I just remembered I had used the skip character feature for the characters 心 and 可 since I knew them already which is why it says I am still at 99.3%

I would prefer to have skipped characters count with regards to this widget so I don’t think I’m missing anything but understand that there could be an arguement to the contrary.

Thanks and hope ya’ll had a great weekend!

[phil]

Yeah I see where you’re coming from

There may be a nice compromise where there’s an asterisk to indicate, “hey, there are some skipped ones in this set”

[mikefernandez]

Phil, thanks for the reply. That sounds great. Today I also got the summary email that gave me the same itch “I thought I was done with HSK 2!!!” haha.

Thanks again!

Best,

Michael

[mikefernandez]

Thank you guys for the update!!!