Web version no longer has "words containing"

About a week ago I noticed that the “words containing” list no longer appears when using the web site. Previously after writing a character I could click on the character where it appears in the section below “Mnemonic” and when the window with more information popped up there would be a list of words that contained the character shown in the lower right corner of the popup window. Usually this had to be expanded to show all words, but now it is completely missing for all my study items. I found it to be a very useful feature. I hope that this is a bug and not a redesign.

Hi, this was a mistake from a recent update, thanks for the report. It’s been fixed up!

Michael, thanks for the prompt fix. Out of curiosity, it seems like some time during the last year the “words containing” list got populated by more obscure characters instead of high frequency characters, or more usages of the characters in phonetic transliterations. Was this something on your end, or maybe just a function of the particular words I am studying? (I study by focusing on one deck at a time). For what it may be worth, I would definitely prefer to see the highest frequency examples of words containing a given character.

Here’s an example: I am studying the list “800 Prolific Characters” and for the character 细 99% of the words seem to be highly technical medical terms, but words such as 细节 and 详细 do not appear. I would guess that these words would be higher frequency than most on the list. The list has one transliteration (ASEAN = 亚细安)and the rest seem to all be obscure medical terms.

Currently the words contained are sorted by Skritter’s “toughness” value, which was a value developed early on in Skritter’s development (before there was even a comprehensive set of vocabs) and doesn’t actually correspond to any frequency or difficulty in learning a word. In the future, we want to improve this so that more reasonable words are better prioritized. We’re currently in the middle of developing some algorithms to better categorize words, so once we have that locked in place, the door opens to improving features like this.

We did do an import of the latest CEDICT data last year, but it shouldn’t have significantly affected the words shown. The contained words are not personalized to your account, but it could be the nature of your recent studies has taken you to characters with more obscure contained words.

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