For the past half a year, I've been letting Yomiwa's "Common" word label help me decide what words to add to Anki. Before a few days ago, this would have had me believe that only a very manageable amount of words were candidates. But after what I'm assuming is an update to the frequency database, it says that basically every single word I ever looked up has that label, making it completely worthless as an arbitrary decider of what I focus on.
I peeked at my lists a while ago using Yomichan, and it seemed like most of the "Common" words at the time maxed out at 50k, but today I had a word ranked at 98575 frequency in anime and dramas, so I suspect the threshold is closer to 100k now.
Normally, I wouldn't care about these metrics, but since I've started paying attention to these labels and rankings in the past six months, it has helped me to add new words consistently. Prior to this, I only added whatever had a non-jōyō kanji, so it was hard to notice any improvements in my vocabulary. It also didn't help that I had a high enough comprehension rate to get away with only educated guesses on unknown words without feeling the need to check and actually close any gaps in my understanding, even a little bit at a time.
I wouldn't mind just scrolling through my lists in a browser using a hover dictionary and picking my own threshold, but the process is tedious and having something I can spot at a glance would be tremendously helpful.
by ignoremesenpie