Hey there everyone,

I am curious what advice people would give in terms of researching if a character/word is useful to learn.

Skritter labels characters and words according to "easy, medium, hard, rare" etc. but what does this actually mean?

Nciku dictionary has HSK stars for their words but likewise I am not sure I understand what it means. Does 6/6 stars mean it would be part of HSK 6 or does it mean something else?

According to these criteria, how do you chose which words to learn?

Good luck with your studies!
funchinese

I'm not too familiar with the HSK numbering system, or which words should be considered medium vs. hard difficulty, but personally I'd suggest common usage/frequency lists if you're looking to add words from a source that you aren't studying from (i.e. a text book, podcasts, etc). This ensures that even if you learn the word out of context (just from a list), chances are high that you'll encounter it in speech or reading materials to reenforce it.

Some can be found here:
http://www.skritter.com/vocab/tags?tag=most%20common
Out of those I like the movie vocab in particular, as it seems to cover more spoken Chinese.

Of course learning these in context (in a text, lesson, etc) will make retention much easier than just adding them to Skritter.

"Of course learning these in context (in a text, lesson, etc) will make retention much easier than just adding them to Skritter."

Completely agree, it's virtually impossible to remember a random character or word during the long-term without context and daily usage. The question then is how to most effectively use skritters features for researching a word.

So far I have added all components and words to my miscellaneous list which to me seem to be useful when I research it.

Consider this word for example: 腿 (tui3, leg). In this case I already knew the left character 月 (yue4, flesh) and what sort of characters it can be part of. Like in this case it seems that a few body parts use this for meaning. However, the righ character I've never come across. Therefore I decided to add some of the words that according to skritter are "easy" and "medium" and that at the same time has an HSK rank according to Nciku.com. Words which are labeled difficult or rare and which do not have an HSK rank I won't add.

My intention is to revise all the words that I have added once I am finished with my regular coursework. There are currently a lot of words but I am hoping that they will be an efficient way to learn a set of words/characters that use the same components that I have recently been studying and which in some cases have similar meanings (especially for nouns). But in fact I don't know if I'm just being stupid or not. I'm really curious what others think..

Perhaps I would be better off just buy another textbook and spend my time on that.

Btw, your link to the frequency list did not work. Doing a search for "most20common" did not work either.

At the link below look in the right column, click "most common"; the link didn't work because %20 is a space (which creates problems for auto-detected links).
http://www.skritter.com/vocab

I think its a good idea to keep an eye on radicals that appear in a common type/set of words (e.g. 月 in body parts), although this will only take you so far; after all, some of the characters are there for phonetic reasons, or are remnants of the simplification process and thus don't have a strong link to their original (perhaps) more meaningful traditional counterparts. In these cases retaining the character might simply be an issue of maximizing exposure, as thinking of a logical reasoning to it might be a exercise in futility. That's why I'm interested in frequency, at least at the moment (once one drills down into more formal written material I imagine many more obscure words become necessary).

I find it helpful to add concatenated words that contain the word I'm studying, which really helps drill in the definition. E.g.:
退
退钱
退票
退学
退货
and so on...

So, one way to consider the usefulness of a single character might be the frequency that it appears *in other characters*, especially if those other characters are quite useful. To get an idea of this you can click the My Words tab, search for a single character and see all the words it appears in (black if you've added already, grey if not yet added). In the case of 退, because I've learned its meaning pretty well from the above examples, I can get a good idea of most other meanings really quickly.

Speaking for myself, I never learn from frequency lists. They may seem tempting at first, but I don't think studying from them really helps retention. I use them mostly to gauge my progress; for example, looking at the frequency list of the 1000 most common characters, I may recognize about 90%. That gives you some sort of benchmark by which you can mark your progress.

I also rarely learn characters based on the radicals they're composed of. To me, that seems like English learners deciding to learn new words based on their spelling, rather than how useful they are, or the context in which they're used. I suppose you could learn this way; it seems a little unnatural to me, but everyone's studying style is unique.

I think most people learn characters from sources such as textbooks, articles, and books. There are lots of sources for learning this way.

@atdlouis I agree that mindlessly following frequency lists may have decreasing returns, but I think there is merit in reinforcing studies of some characters that aren't 'sticking' by looking at what other words contain that character. In my example for 退, I only would add a couple of the most intuitive/useful seeming words out of the several dozen that include it, just because I find them so logical (and composed of other characters I already know) that studying them is no additional effort since they are pushed back in my reviews so quickly, but each time they come up they serve as a reinforcement of 退. Again, this is definitely a "low-hanging fruit" approach and might be less useful once you pass a basic-intermediate vocabulary level.

I also haven't tried selecting new words based on radicals, but of course keeping a close eye on the radicals in the words your learning can be useful (sometimes). I guess if you made a point to study a set of words that were subject specific (e.g. body parts) you would quickly notice they shared a set of radicals for meaning, which could be pretty helpful in retention. I think the risk when adding new words by phonetic radical is that you learn a ton of characters pronunciation but have no clue what they mean.

I agree that text books or natural sources are the most useful way to learn. I suspect the words learned via this way (just adding words as you encounter them) will quickly converge with a frequency list approach (where one adds X frequent words a day and makes a point of *regular exposure* to written/spoken material). Definitely not advocating studying a frequency list as anyone's sole source of Chinese exposure!

Although I kinda agree that mindlessly learning words from word-lists can be kinda pointless, however the fact remains that to have at least a half-decent grasp of any language you are gonna have to know the top 10,000 words (or most of them at least). I guess it depends how you wanna learn them and how fast you wanna achieve it is the problem. Learning from books and authentic sources is all well and good, but I think that if you wanna get a move on, then learning from frequency lists might be the way to go...(ignoring the question of what authentic sources to choose if you a starter, since your unlikely to find much of interest IMO)

Of course you could see it relative to your level as well, so if you are a beginner then combining the top 1000 words (?) with the words that you are learning from your textbook might also be useful. Since many textbooks somehow manage to fit in tough (or even obscure) words right from the very start, which could be annoying for some people.

To answer the original question: the toughness rankings are a bit of a misnomer, and should probably be called "importance" for right now. They're a mixture of standard usage frequency lists and weighting from learner-focused textbooks (including HSK). So while the standard frequency lists will be hitting you with the "economic development" type words, and the HSK levels are often just missing things, the toughness rating are more like what the standard usage frequency lists should be for students of the language.

I am in two minds about frequency lists, but I just picked up a very good book when I was in London. It's A Frequency Dictionary of Mandarin Chinese, by Richard Xiao, Paul Rayson and Tony McEnery. It has the top 5,000 most commonly used words, some of which are single characters. Every one is given a context sentence. Throughout the book are about 30 lists of commonly used word groups (fruits, drinks, clothing, weather, English loanwords; spoken register, fiction register, non-fiction register, news register). And at the back are frequency lists for various parts of speech - I've been looking at the verbs.

Margaret

Thank you Nick for explaining the ranking system. People seem to have differing opinions about the usefulness of frequency lists. I think I'm going to have to try this approach and then it would be interesting to create another post where I share my subjective experience.

A good thing is probably to have a teacher (or a native friend), who knows your level, check all the vocabulary that you've added from the frequency lists. That way they can explain it for you and perhaps give you some context at the same time while also taking away those words that probably won't be that useful to you at your level.