I nuked my account back in December and started over. Last summer I had studied the first part of the New Practical Chinese Reader so I recently decided to go back through that list. I was shocked and amazed at the things I remembered, even though I hadn't reviewed them in four months or more. Some of the stuff I remembered was completely random, like people's names. Even the stuff I forgot was not too far from recall, I just had to refresh my memory a little bit. Amazing...

The nuke was the best thing I ever did, by the way. It let me start over with a much clearer focus on high-frequency and/or useful characters and words.

There was a feature request a while back to allow us to see the frequency of characters and words. Is that something that could easily be displayed in the right-hand pane? It would be nice to know when you can safely delete something because it's highly unlikely to come up.

James

It would be great to be able to at least easily delete a character/word. Sometimes I am having difficulty learning a word and it really annoys me because the word is not that important, such as a really old uncommon word form a textbook.

if you press the little magnifying glass on the practice page you can

ooer, seriously? Im off to try that now!

Yeah that's vital. Otherwise I'd still be studying stuff like "热气球" and the proper names of random fictional characters.

We've got plans to replace the magnifying glass lookup menu with a much beefier box that would have the frequency info (and a bunch of other stuff). It will have to partially obscure the Flash window, though...

@nick: Awesome...

jww1066@ I see no trouble in learning words like 热气球. It's the sort of thing that'll get pushed back to the far regions of SRS fairly quickly, but you'll be aware of the term, so wont get in a muddle when listening. Names, sure I wouldn't add. Everything else: why not?

I've added it to my queue in any case...

@Byzanti: I agree, 热气球 isn't a huge problem because it's made up of frequent characters. It's just a matter of priorities; I would rather spend my time on things that are more likely to come up.

In Portuguese, thanks to learning songs in Capoeira I know all sorts of crazy stuff like "to slip on the mud" and "to step on a dry leaf" but the other day I was speaking with a Brazilian woman and I didn't understand the word "hot". That happens to me all the time when I study crazy stuff and neglect frequently-used words.

James

I have started religiously deleting words I picked up from textbook lists. If you're not in a structured learning environment< the HSK lists do wonders for me. I keep running into new words that I say to myself "no way I'm ever going to need that or recognize it", and then a few days later I spot it on the news or on a sign and go wow, I guess HSK is really useful... I guess the ministry of education can be useful after all... :-)