Absolute beginner

[ABCinChina]

OneEye Posted:

"The most effective thing I've come across in studying the characters is using an SRS program. SRS stands for Spaced Repetition System and is like flashcards on steroids. This is a better explanation than I could hope to give.

I've been copying and pasting the most common 3000 characters, their pronunciations, and meanings into Mnemosyne and the program automatically chooses when to bring each character up again based on how well I've done on that character in the past. It also automatically makes me learn new characters at a rate of 20 per day (or whatever I choose to set it to), provided I actually make myself do so. Very easy to do, and very effective."

Thanks for the introduction to The Mnemosyne Project. I was currently looking for an alternative to the CueCard software program that I was using. The problem with Mnemosyne is that the fonts all do not display Chinese characters very well. What font do you use?

[OneEye]

I think I'm using Lucida. I'm not on that computer right now so I can't check, but I'm pretty sure that's right.

[ZLearner]

I like using mnemosyne too and am cutting and pasting 3000 common characters too.

I find that Arial Unicode is great for all the characters to appear.

Also save in word as encoded text UTF-8.

And make the letters very LARGE and the questions and answers very brief. This helps remembering I find.

I'm able to recognize about 30 words after 2 weeks on mnemosyne technique.

I'm also using the Supermemo with paper technique (no computer necessary).

It follows the same Leitner time gap for testing and provides a chart for your testings eg test 2 in 4 days, test 3 in 11 days....

with Mnemosyne you will find that when you test yourself on complete sentences broken up into say 3 words at a time, suddenly those 3000 characters you memorised are starting to make sense.

They are more difficult to remember when in isolation.

I find that actually writing out the charcters to create the tables on paper to test myself is helping me remember the characters.

I have to be very organised with filing though, cos I lose track of my next test for every language I'm trying to learn.

(Spanish, Cantonese and Mandarin)