Flashcards - how many can you review in 30 mins? how long to review 1000?

[crjcrj]

I am trying to go through the HSK Level 1 Flashcards on PlecoDict, but I just get a bit discouraged that there are soooo many. Can anyone help me manage my expectations please?

1. How many flashcards (self scored, flashcard gives character, answer gives pinyin and definition) can you get through in 30 minutes on average?

2. How long does it take you to get through 1000 flashcards?

I am wondering if I set aside 30 mins to one hour a day, realistically how many days I need to go through 1000, etc...

Then repeat, and repeat and repeat

Based on some answers, I am thinking of breaking them down into smaller groups - but probably just random groups (I saw that other forum with great ideas about grouping them in clever ways, but I will have to wait for someone else to do that) So that leads me to think how many can you do in an average 30 minute session, and manbey that is my target group size??

General vague estimated answers and comments all appreciated!

Thank you so much!!

[renzhe]

It depends on how tired I am and on the motivation level.

Maybe 100-150 if I'm in a good mood. 100-150 is also the number of flashcards I try to have scheduled per day. Anything more than that, and my concentration plummets.

[character]

Based on some answers, I am thinking of breaking them down into smaller groups - but probably just random groups [....]

It definitely helped me with the vocabulary I was trying to learn. Try groups of 12-20 or so. Add in or switch to a new group when you've mastered the ones in the current group.

[crjcrj]

thanks so much for the replies... I had this ridiculous thought that others were doing like 500 a day and I was struggling... I can do 100 or so without too much stress, it is past that that just fries my brain, it is the HUGE size of the HSK file that kills me... I get discouraged it takes me a week to get to 500 or so... so I think I will break down the file into cards of 100. That will be 10 files, so I can get through the stack every two weeks...

Thanks!

[renzhe]

Doesn't plecodict do spaced repetition?

Spaced repetition is a must if you're interested in long-term memory and thousands of flashcards.

Not using spaced repetition in this day and age is intentional self-sabotage.

[crjcrj]

yes it does, but getting through the 1000 is what is killing me.. I thought, cool, I will do these, with SRS... but at the rate I am going, it will be a few weeks before I get to repeat any cards... maybe I have my settings all wrong, but I set it to mark a card a learned when I get it right 3 times in a row, which means I have to go through the stack 3 times at least, which is 3000 plus cards... at 100 a day on good days, but some days I don't even find the time for that. That is why I was thinking more manageable chunks is better.

maybe I should play with the settings more, thanks for the reminder.

[HarryCallahan]

I'm taking a sort of psychological approach to it, which involves lots of flashing in the option (testing) mode.

I see the learning process as proceeding along these lines,

1. Imprint the character in your brain. That is the concept of the character, recognize it as a character, with no further attributes attached.

2. Learn the pronounciation for that character/word, that is the pinyin.

3. Learn the english meaning for the above 2.

4. Learn specific usage, context in grammar.

There will be some overlap amongst the stages, the testing requires you to choose the corresponding hanzi, pinyin or meaning, so you are already tieing at least two things together doing that, but I'm still thinking inside your brain the chinese characters take time to imprint.

I don't mind getting them wrong, actually I want to get them wrong when I don't know them, I want Pleco to know that so it flashes me until I learn them.

I suggest trying this more rapid approach, set-up Pleco in test mode, do about 400 a day. Restrict the set by score or the learnt flag, as you learn the words they drop out and you're left with the remainder, eventually they are all learnt (to a certain extent). Once you ace one test set-up then move on to another. BTW for this I had 2 in a row gives me 5 points, and I needed to get score > 120 for it be be excluded, a wrong answer was drop 8 % from score, harsh but it should be, you have a 20 % chance of guessing it right.

I'm doing this now and am at around stages 2 and 3 for most words that I didn't know before.

[anonymoose]

yes it does, but getting through the 1000 is what is killing me.. I thought, cool, I will do these, with SRS... but at the rate I am going, it will be a few weeks before I get to repeat any cards

For 1000 cards, I think a few weeks is short enough. It sounds like you are demanding too much of yourself. I mean, think about it. If you knew 20000 words in Chinese (and were able to use them, of course), you'd be pretty much fluent, so if you're expecting to learn 1000 words in say, one month, then it should take you 20 months to become fluent. Now for most of us, it probably takes several years to reach that stage, so I'd say cut yourself a bit of slack, and just get through them at a comfortable pace.

[renzhe]

yes it does, but getting through the 1000 is what is killing me.. I thought, cool, I will do these, with SRS... but at the rate I am going, it will be a few weeks before I get to repeat any cards...

Wait, you're going through these cards for the first time, and you know most of them?

In that case, mark all of them with a "5" or whatever the best grade is. It will be painful for the first week, and a bit annoying for a while after that, but once they're spread around a bit, it's no problem.

I've been through the process a few times. Just do as many as you can each day. The numbers become saner after a couple of weeks.

[gato]

yes it does, but getting through the 1000 is what is killing me.. I thought, cool, I will do these, with SRS... but at the rate I am going, it will be a few weeks before I get to repeat any cards...

Space repetition doesn't work for a large number of new cards (you have to break them down into smaller sets), and it doesn't work for people who have an irregular study schedule.

Try what I keep on recommending to people with a large number of new cards. Nobody seems to want to listen to me, but I keep trying.

http://plecoforums.com/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=1513

Flashcards Simplified

http://plecoforums.com/viewtopic.php?f=13&t=1809

Flashcards - spaced repitition question

[crjcrj]

I hadn't realised it was important to mention this - I know most of the cards... I just haven't reviewed them all in one go. Prior to this, I just reviewed Boya chapters one by one, or two at a time. I am not using the cards to 'teach me' 1000 new characters, I am using them to review the characters I know and reinforce the ones I have learnt but clearly forgotten!

Also, I am not consistent and don't have time to do the flashcards every day. I spend 4 hours every morning in Chinese class, then spend every afternoon playing with my two toddlers in English. By the time I get them to bed, most evenings I am too shattered to think much - let alone do homework or have stimulating conversations with my husband in English (our native language), but I do read Chinese every night before bed, usually just a page or two of Chinese Breeze books (which are at a level lower than mine, but I haven't found good books at the 1000 character level)

Gato - I have been using your settings for a long time, you rock! Most of all, you wrote them really clearly. There have been other flashcard settings written up, but they totally confuse me. I think the issue is my lack of consistency and not using it every day - maybe this is the main issue I need to address rather than settings.

After all the chatting last night, I went through 150 cards before bed... I have about 200 to go before finally finishing the 1000+... then, if the settings work, I should only have the 250 or so I got wrong (or chose to mark wrong because while I know them, I don't know them well and want review). That should bring it down to a manageable level to review.

Thanks for the advice, comments and inspiration.... slowly I am figuring it all out.

[gato]

Thanks, you give me the courage to go on with my evangelizing. Haha.

What's your accuracy with the the cards you are reviewing (using a strict of definition "accuracy", including pronunciation and meaning)? If it's more than 90%, then you probably separate the cards you know less well and spend most of your time with them. That'll reduce the overall time you are spending to review.

For example, you can arrange three decks/lists of flashcard (in Pleco 2.0 terminology, it's now "categories"):

1. Cards you know very well (i.e. almost never get wrong). These you can review once every month or longer.

2. Cards you are familiar with but that are not completed etched in your memory. These you can review every week.

3. New cards that you are still learning. These you should try to review at least once a day. I used to review once in the morning and once at night, when I had a lot of time on my hands a few years ago.

[blaketx]

Gato -

Would you mind explaining why spaced repetition doesn't work with a large set of new cards? I looked in your links, where you said, "SRS assumes you review the whole list at once." I'm not understanding how it assumes this.

[gato]

Would you mind explaining why spaced repetition doesn't work with a large set of new cards?

Actually, my comment is about SRS as implemented with programs like SuperMemo, Anki and so forth. The method of three or so decks of flashcards (or virtual cards) of varying familiarity is a form of SRS, too, but it's manually controlled by you, not the software program.

The software SRS, as I understand it, assume that you are studying X number of cards all at once. The first time, you are tested on all X cards. The program will schedule your next test for each card depending on your test result for that card. Cards you get wrong more often will be tested more frequently, and cards you get right more often less frequently.

A flaw with this automatic scheduling system is that if you study irregularly -- maybe every day this week and not all next week, or four, five times a month at irregular intervals -- the software can't really accommodate that. You will be tested on all the past due AND scheduled cards next time, resulting in a huge pile up of cards to be tested.)

Another problem is that if your deck has 3000 items and can't be done in one day, then it's unclear when you'll get to the cards at the bottom of the deck. The software will continue to re-test you on the cards you have already learned (at lesser and lesser frequency), but because of that, it will take a long, long time to get to the cards you haven't learned at all further back in the deck.

With the manually controlled method I described, you decide when to review cards you already learned. And if you want to concentrate on completely new cards, you can do that, too.

[renzhe]

There is certainly some advantage to having more control over what you study and when. Especially for people who know their own memory and learning patterns really well.

Still, the advantage of an SRS for me is not in the initial memorisation (I can really remember things well the first time), but in the long-term memorisation of tens of thousands of flashcards. when you have learned 5000 cards, you will forget many of them, unless you refresh them at proper intervals, and this is where the SRS scheduling really helps.

I often use a drill deck for memorising new stuff, and once I'm happy with them, I add them to learned cards and forget about them and let the program take care of them.

Personally, I don't see any downside at all to using SRS software. It can get annoying if you get a pile of flashcards for review after taking a break, but you would be forgetting all these flashcards anyway if you were using paper-based ones. The pile is there because you should be reviewing those cards, and simply ignoring them won't change that

[haton]

(Excuse the self advertising)

Given the difficulty of drilling in Chinese vocabulary, I wrote myself a training game. One of my goals was that the game had to be fast, in order to be able to review significant lists of vocabulary in a short time.

In 15 minutes, I am usually able to review around 100 words. And since the game is based on spaced repetitions, the study time is focused on the "difficult" words, or the ones I am about to forget.

The game is called PINGRID, it is freeware (support donations welcome)

Check it out at: http://ehaton.blogspot.com