Words left behind

[pedrozurawski]

Hi everybody. I’m wondering why I have words being left behind. I’m now getting pretty much exclusively hsk 7 and above words, while many more basic word are still to be learned. What is up with that?

[phil]

You can read more about our word selection algorithm in the docs here.

To highlight one important factor:

• Do all characters have a word item to pair with it? Do some characters have less word items than others?

In short, we always select words to help with learning new characters first. So, as long as you continue to learn new characters, words will be prioritized to make sure you have “word coverage” for those new characters. I understand that the default ordering of words on that list page can be misleading though, we should change that

Here’s another thread on the topic:

Why are some words blocked?

Most of those words are also recently added some days ago which may be why they haven’t shown up quite yet. As Phil mentioned, the word selection algorithm will try to focus on “broad character coverage” (i.e., getting an even character-distribution in the words selected), which is why this may not have shown in your queue quite yet. As we start adding more and more lower-level HSK words, we are also looking into potentially adding an option for users to change the word-selection algorithm to p…

[kevin]

To add to this, if you want to have a greater mix of words, you can configure the Daily word limit to be much higher. This will result in more words being selected per character, which in turn will lead to these words showing up in your lessons.

We are in the planning stages to make some of this more straightforward. Effectively we need to expose setting(s) that allow a user to indicate how many words per character they want to learn on average, and/or whether they want to prioritize learning low-level HSK words over learning new characters, for example.

[pedrozurawski]

I see. Thank you guys for the quick and informative reply. I will tweek around some of the settings to see if I can achieve a better balance for my current goals.

I was doing 15 hanzi and 5 words per day until I reached around 1.900 hanzi, thinking that when I had a good number of hanzi under my belt I could switch to more words and actually have learning the words with hanzi that I haven’t seen in a while as a way to also review the hanzi and consolidate them better.

Maybe a 15 words to 5 hanzi ratio and having “word unlocking” set to “unlock when characters are familiar” would help achieve this goal?

I actually came to a point where I really enjoy learning new hanzi everyday so I would like to keep that going also.

thanks