Here’s another one that’s been around for a while, but which you might not have noticed. This time it’s the toughness indicators in the word popup, which help let you know how useful a character or word is. To get to the word popup and check it out, click the magnifying glass in the prompt, or any character or word throughout the rest of the site:
Then look at the top of the word popup. Next to the word, it will say something like, “easiest”, “medium”, or “super rare”. This scale is based on our own home blend of:
- standard usage frequencies: how often a character or word is used in Chinese/Japanese texts;
- importance in textbooks: how often and how early it appears in textbooks for language learners, weighted by level of the textbook;
- and how easy it is to learn, for words with multiple characters.
This should be more useful than the standard usage frequency rankings, which tend to overemphasize like “economic development” and deemphasize things like “hello”. Hope it comes in handy!