Just a small question. Is super rarer more rare than hardest?
Haha, I'm a little confused.

“Rare” is about how often one sees the word, and “hard” is about how difficult one can remember it. The character 𢀓 is super rare, but after seeing it once, I can immediately remember it. And then there are words that I've seen thousands of times but still can't remember.

pts, I think he's talking about the Skritter toughness/level/importance ratings, which are slightly confusingly named metrics in themselves, I'll admit.

The "super rare" level means the word is less common than the "hardest" level, but the "unknown" level means the word/character wasn't even included in any frequency lists or textbooks that we used to generate the toughness levels.

Code looks like this, with the toughness being related to frequency on a logarithmic scale:

def toughnessString(self):
if not self.toughness:
self.calculateToughness()
if self.toughness < 2: return "easiest"
elif self.toughness < 3: return "easier"
elif self.toughness < 4: return "easy"
elif self.toughness < 5: return "medium"
elif self.toughness < 6: return "hard"
elif self.toughness < 9: return "harder"
elif self.toughness < 11: return "hardest"
elif self.toughness < 16: return "super rare"
else: return "unknown"

There are known unknowns (i.e. "unknown" level on skritter) and unknown unknowns (i.e. not on skritter) - so how is 𢀓 pronounced and what does it mean?

Couldn't spot it on mdbg either - related question, which online (Chinese to English) / downloadable dictionary has the most entries? I always thought mdbg was supposed to "have it all"...

𢀓 is the original character for 巨.

Also, since mdbg didn't have it, here's a few other online spots that have that character defined:

http://www.zdic.net/zd/zi3/ZdicF0ZdicA2Zdic80Zdic93.htm

http://zi.artx.cn/zi/ArtX46272Dict41.html

http://hanzi.hanwenxue.com/zhonghuazidian/?q=𢀓

Thanks pts and tgack.

𢀓 seems to be a windows pc only kind of character, as it doesn't show up properly on iphone, blackberry or windows phone!

Please install a proper font. It requires a font that can display Unicode extension-b characters.

𢀓 and other characters that show up as completely missing from Skritter are outside the Basic Multilingual Plane and have all sorts of problems being displayed and supported on most computer systems. We were working on support for them at one point, but realized that even if we did get things going on our end, the characters would often not display on users' systems, and are usually not worth studying anyway, so we gave up.

Thanks Nick - there has never been a character that I wanted to actively study that wasn't on skritter ... fully understood there are many more important things to work on than extend them ...

p.s. the best possible feature I've heard recently is a month or so ago you mentioned that you might make the online Skritter word popup available when you're on the iOS device and you have an internet connection - that would be awesome, and get rid of the one disadvantage of the ios app (from my perspective anyway) - I often like to wander off into related characters etc., see words that use the character(s) I'm studying etc.

Thanks Nick! I haven't yet stepped on any character that I was interested in studying that wasn't in skritter.
I'm currently reading "China: A History" by John Keay in english, converting the pinyin to hanzi of some interesting history related characters and enhancing a little the skritter description.
So that's why I've been running into super rare characters and words.

There also seems to be a "rare!", I'm assuming that goes between hardest and super rare on Nick's list?

Got it on 化学治疗