🤝 Word skipping, prioritization, misc updates

[phil]

Hello here’s a few quick updates, some long overdue!

Word Skipping

When we enabled the ability to skip characters, the only way to skip words was to skip all the characters within it.

But sometimes you already know a word, or don’t want to focus on it, so it makes sense to extend skipping to words as well

You can learn more about it within the docs.

Word prioritization

Seeing as we’re adding the ability to skip words, it’d make sense to be able to prioritize them too, especially if you come across a word that pops up in immersion!

Cool thing about word prioritization is how it handles character prioritization within the word. For example, if “Agriculture” was prioritized before prioritizing “farmer” in the picture above, if we unprioritize farmer, “Agriculture” retains its prioritization

You can read more about word prioritization in the docs.

Visually similar characters

While browsing the character pages, you may have noticed the “Visually Similar” relationship more often.

We’ve rehauled how we generated these relationships are determined, adding roughly around ~2k relationships across both courses

We plan to refine our algorithm overtime and add manual entries where needed

Small item page improvements

Previously you had to keep on clicking “load more” when you were hunting for a particular item relationship on some page. it made a lot more sense to instead load all of them, so that’s what we did:

But to make it even easier to search these relationships, we’ve sorted them by how long ago you started the item, as well as the hsk level/position of the item

Lesson ordering updates

You may have noticed a small switch up in the Lesson ordering

Fun fact about the HSK position of a character: it’s alphabetical! – to clarify, the HSK position of a character is what order it shows up in within an HSK level.

If the deciding factor in our sorting algorithm ended up being the HSK position, you would get the same sound association (e.g. George Costanza) a few times in a row.

So, we’ve loaded in character frequency data for each course, reducing this collision.

Mobile review improvements

We were able to find a workaround when it comes to prompting the keyboard on iOS. I imagine the keyboard would prompt on Android regardless, since we were already asking the browser to focus on the input.

In addition, you may notice an additional floating submit button on the bottom left. This makes it so you don’t have to reach all the way up to the middle of the screen to advance to the next question – we may move it to the bottom right and switch out the chat button, not sure yet.

---

That’s all – Happy studying!

[dollarwolv]

yayy!! Thanks guys! This makes the app a whole lot better <3

[mikefernandez]

Hey guys! I’ve been using the skip word feature a lot recently and felt compelled to make a little video describing the workflow I am currently using for my daily lessons. I’m sure that none of the information is new to y’all but thought some user feedback might be useful. Cheers!

Hanzi Hero: Word Skipping Feedback

[lorentz]

Nice video, I wonder if it would be possible to implement a skip/prioritize here.

[kevin]

Thank you very much for this detailed feedback.

We are currently working on adding “skipping” directly into the lesson page. The idea is that you would go through the lesson stepper as before and be able to “skip” any lesson that comes up the second it shows up, where it would be replaced with something else instead more or less instantly.

We are still working on the initial beta for it, but it should come out in the next coming weeks. I think this will solve this main pain point of needing to go to a separate page.

I’m really excited about this, as it is something we have been working towards over the past couple of months really (I can’t believe we only added character skipping like three?! months ago!) As we start to add more and more words over time, an ability to easily skip directly within the lesson flow will be more and more essential.

As a separate aside, your comment about the characters not being skipped much sort of reflects why the app up until this point hasn’t had much focus on a good skipping UX flow, as we have only reached a pretty good mixture of words per character in the past couple of months (with many many thousands more to add). However, for words I think a completionist approach is counter-productive towards most study goals and I think an integrated skipping feature will help soften this very sharp edge.

Incidentally, we will also make skipping characters, components, and sounds possible as well within the lesson flow directly (we just added skipping components and sounds a couple days ago, but haven’t announced it yet), along with making it so one can choose to skip a character before any of its component/sound lessons show up, which was one thing we were always concerned about when thinking about implementing a smoother skipping experience.

[mikefernandez]

Yeah, that all makes sense. Thanks for taking the time to review my feedback!

As always, appreciate the work being put into this app. I’m looking forward to reviewing the new functionality as it rolls out.

慢慢来！

Best,

Michael

[mikefernandez]

One last suggestion for now on the word skipping functionality I ran into today - once the toast pop-up expires it isn’t abruptly clear that something is skipped.

Until I actually was typing this up it hadn’t even occured to me that the color of the button changes tones of gray between the skip/not-skipped states. Could just be a me problem though!