Add bulk word frequency information to your anki chinese decks, based on an internet chinese word usage corpus
When I read a random article and find new words I don't know, sometimes they are really common, useful words. Other times they are incredibly obscure. I have no way to know at the time, and memorize them all. Then I'm in the weird situation of knowing an extremely literary, weird way to say something, but not knowing the normal way.
The other problem is that you are very rarely going to run into a rare word again, so it won't get reinforced much, and you'll probably forget it.
So overall, it's almost always better to study words that are common!
This will go through the decks you have now and fill in two new fields, permillion (frequency of this word appearing per million words in a chinese internet corpus), and frequency_html which is just text describing how frequent the word is from:
-very basic (1st 500 words)
-basic (500-1000)
-very common (1000-2000)
-common (2000-3700)
-uncommon (3700-6300)
-rare (6300-10500)
-very rare (10500-18600)
-obscure (18600-50000)
Most articles will have obscure words in them, which is annoying - but they will always be different obscure words, so it will take years of memorizing before you can reliably know them.
WARNING: DEFINITELY BACK UP YOUR DECKS FIRST; Also, try it for just one deck first so it doesn't take too long!
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DISABLE AUTO SYNC! in case you mess up the deck
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Back up your decks
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Add two fields to the deck you want: permillion (word appearances per million words in the internet corpus) frequency_html (description of this rareness, sincelooking at raw numbers is too distracting)
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Put internet-zh.num in the same folder (or somewhere else and edit the code to point to it). This file is fun to look at, set your browser encoding to utf-8 and see how far down you know it.
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Put the add_frequency_info.py script into the root of your addons directory, which on windows is at something like "c:/users//my docs/Anki/addons"
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Modify the code line cards=mw.col.findCards('"deck:other"') to choose which cards you want to modify. Changing it to just mw.col.findCards('') will do them all. by default it will only work on deck "other", which you probably don't even have; change that to the exact name of one of your decks you want to work with
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Restart anki
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In the tools dropdown select "fill in card frequency info" which will start the process.
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Running it again will do all the work again, replacing old permillion & frequency_html fields, in case you want to modify the descriptions, etc. You need to restart anki every time you change the script. I chose the divisions after some trial and error and they seem reasonable.
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Search in the search box for "obscure" to find those super rare (less than 2/million occurances) words; decide if you really want to spend time learning them. I went back and deleted a bunch of words I never saw before.