SRS strategies

[jbradfor]

NOTE: this is a thread to discuss different strategies about using Spaced Recognition Software (SRS). Please see #5 first for a more detailed explanation

@Roddy [Over here.]

Now have 1820 characters learned (up 300 this month) which is less than I'd hoped, but the review queue can really be a killer at this point and I've spent a lot of time clearing that rather than getting on to new stuff. Guess I just need to keep clearing the queue until they are all learned well enough that they won't come back till 2019.

I've found that with other SRS applications as well. The first 1-3 weeks are exhilarating: you zoom through hundreds of characters/words learned, and start to think that somehow you've reached a point where learning Chinese comes easily. Then the spaced repetition kicks. It's no longer as fun, as you're not learning new words, so you spend less time on it. Then you hurl back down to earth as you realize that there are more words to learn in the queue than there were a couple days ago, even though there are no new words. Eventually, steady state is reached. You realized that learning Chinese is, in fact, still as hard as it ever was, but you're still happy when you realize that SRS does, in fact, work, and you have truly (at least for a couple of months) learned new words.

At least, that's my experience, if I can be so bold as to try to give you learning advice

Edited February 1, 2010 at 08:37 PM by jbradfor
Added link to orginal quote after move

[chrix]

How about making the program show you new words first. Anki has such an option, so it would show you the 20 (or whatever limit you set) new items first, irrespective of what's in your queue.

[jbradfor]

I've thought of doing that, but never did. It would likely improve the "fun" factor. But I think it would hurt the learning. With SRS, for me I've found it most important to do the older first, as I am in greatest danger of forgetting them; the new words I don't really know yet, so if I don't get to them right away, no big loss. The other problem is that unless you really are good about going through the entire word list each time (which I'm not), adding new words every day would likely lead to a todo list that grows without bounds.

[chrix]

That's why I personally don't do it, but just wanted to bring it up as a suggestion..

[chrix]

I thought we might use a topic to discuss strategies how to best use your SRS.

- many decks vs. one deck

- using ready-made decks vs. creating your own

- do you keep different decks for characters, words, sentences, or everything lumped together?

- what to do if your backlog keeps growing and growing

- what to do once there are no "new" cards in a deck

- recognition vs. production

- how do you structure a card

- how do you stay consistent with your classification, or do you vary your judgements according to circumstances, and if so, how?

- anything else that comes to mind....

I use several decks, I use a ready-made deck, the HSK list, and I also enter my own words in a separate deck. I also have several "special" decks, such as for chengyu, simplified/traditional and erhua-qingsheng, and planning on adding one for poyinzi.

I don't believe in learning sentences, I'm mostly concentrating on words, but I also have two decks for characters, one for "rare characters" and one for reviewing 2,500 characters starting from the 1,500th most frequent character.

As far as structuring the cards: I have a field for Chinese language definitions, and one for example sentences, where I can put some words in context, but neither are used too often. I do use a plugin for the pinyin and English, so that's how I try to keep the time spent editing those cards to a minimum.

Edited February 1, 2010 at 08:39 PM by chrix

[jbradfor]

Good idea. Maybe you can use your new-found powers to move the (slightly off-topic) posts on the 2010 AaOPT over here? [And I'm allowed to call them off-topic as I started going off-topic first.]

[jbradfor]

I do use a plugin for the pinyin and English, so that's how I try to keep the time spent editing those cards to a minimum.

I believe you use ANKI? Could you describe how these plug-ins work and how they help and where one gets them?

[chrix]

Yes, the plugin is called pinyin-toolkit. (Plugins can be easily installed through the Anki interface)

You have to tag your deck and name your categories accordingly, then it will automatically look up the pinyin and the English (or German if you want to) in its dictionary (for me also the jiantizi or fantizi), and resort to Google translate if need be.

[renzhe]

- many decks. Not mixing things up helps me get through them faster

- I create my own, but usually from lists I acquire somewhere. I basically script things and get a ready-made deck to work through as a result

- a deck each for characters, words, reversed characters (for writing) and traditional-simplified

- if the deck keeps growing, I give up on learning new stuff and go through a week or two of consolidation. If I'm stuck with 400 cards (rarely happens), I bite the bullet and claw my way through over a weekend

- if there are no new cards in a deck, I add new cards

- ....recognition, I guess. Was that meant to be "production?"

- different cards for different purposes. Generally, the question is something I might encounter (character, word, traditional form...) and the answer is whatever I need to remember it -- generally pinyin + most important meaning.

- when grading myself, I simply play it by ear

I do not put everything into an SRS. For me, it is simply a tool to not forget things and to repeat them until they're internalised. I don't deal with multiple pronunciations, multiple contexts, different usages, example sentences, and all that stuff, as I don't think that flashcards are the best way to learn this. Flashcards are for drilling things, reading and listening are for understanding.

As a consequence, my flashcarding takes about 20 minutes a day (with over 10,000 cards), and I generally spend MUCH more than that on reading and listening.

This approach is working for me.

[chrix]

oops, yes, corrected, that was meant to be "production" .

Great you can keep it down to 20 min a days, though didn't you say on another thread you didn't use your SRS very often last month But I do agree one shouldn't spend too much time on flashcarding...

Well, for instance, I've gone through my trad-simp set. What do I do with it? I've been coming back to it every few weeks...

Oh, and definitely agree that different strategies work for different people. Nonetheless, it can be beneficial to discuss individual strategies...

[jbradfor]

So my goals with the flashcards are twofold: learn additional words to improve my general reading comprehension, and learn words from some podcasts to improve my listening comprehension. I wish that the flashcards also helped my speaking ability, but they don't seem to do much for that, alas.

To that end I have two sets of flashcards: wordlists from something claiming to be a HSK word list, and wordlists that I create from some podcasts (used to be ChinesePod, now seems to be SlowChinese). So each card is one word, with characters on one side, pinyin on the other, and definition on the other. [i like 3 sided cards ]

I use ZDT because it is the only flashcard program I've found that (i) understand Chinese (i.e. characters, pinyin, definition), (ii) makes me enter the answer, rather than my saying correct or not, and (iii) has SRS. [There are things I don't like about ZDT, so if anyone knows of another program that meets those three criteria, please let me know.]

I test myself only on ZDT gives me the characters, I need to type in the pinyin. I usually force myself to say the definition before I type the pinyin. This works for me as in general I can learn the def long before I know the pinyin. However, there are some words for which this is not the case, and I wish ZDT had a mode in which it gives me the definition and I need to type in the character.

I use one wordlist per podcast, and broken the HSK word list into "manageable" 100 word chunks. I keep one wordlist per podcast so I can add new ones only when I've learned old ones, and I can focus on the ones that are of more interest to me. I broken the HSK wordlist into smaller chunks because ZDT, unfortunately and unlike Anki, uses an "all or nothing" approach to wordlists: it either tests you on all the words in a list if you select it, or none if you do not select it. [One area in which Anki is far superior.]

Regarding the "recognition vs. production", that is why I like being forced to enter the pinyin, it ensure that I can "produce" the sound if needed. Which is important to me, to ensure i have the pronunciation correct.

Regarding the backlog, that's just a fact of life for me with how inconsistent my time studying is. So each day I just select enough wordlists (decks) to get around 80-100 words I need to practice, and hope I finish them.

[renzhe]

Well, for instance, I've gone through my trad-simp set. What do I do with it? I've been coming back to it every few weeks...

That's exactly what I do with it. As long as I can still remember everything it throws at me (or the forgetting is minimal), it's one less thing to worry about.

[chrix]

I use ZDT because it is the only flashcard program I've found that (i) understand Chinese (i.e. characters, pinyin, definition), (ii) makes me enter the answer, rather than my saying correct or not, and (iii) has SRS. [There are things I don't like about ZDT, so if anyone knows of another program that meets those three criteria, please let me know.]

Anki can also make you enter the answer. The standard option is not to, as it annoyed too many people, but you can turn it back on (I just tried).

The problem I have with it is that I like to have extensive English definitions, not just a word (the dictionary vs. word list approach). So as much as I'd like to type in the answers, it just doesn't work...

[valikor]

Regarding testing single characters versus words:

Has anyone tried testing single characters by putting a list of English which have 1 Hanzi in common, and the shared Hanzi on the back?

I wonder if having the extra associations (between the words) might make it easier to remember the characters and the words.

Alternatively, maybe I'd fruitlessly searching for the magical method which is going to make Chinese easy... the fact that any given Chinese word probably has multiple possible English translations might make this difficult.

(At any rate, I hope more people decide to post on this thread and share ideas)

[chrix]

Valikor, you could start a thread in the Characters subforum and then we could discuss your idea in more detail.

From a SRS perspective though, my idea would be to minimise time spent on editing the cards, so on this alone it would be a no-go for me.

The only thing I edit flashcards for are mistakes made by the pinyin-toolkit plugin, Taiwan usages and sometimes example sentences or further comments for tricky words, but I try to suspend some of those as again, my goal is not to spend too much time with flashcarding...

[renzhe]

For me, the most important consideration is to minimise the time it takes to answer a card. That's why I keep them very simple, avoid long sentences, etc. It makes it easier to drill, and makes the answer simply "flash" in front of my eyes very quickly.

In terms of magical solutions, there aren't any. There are many crutches and tricks that can be very helpful, and you should use them whenever they are appropriate, but ultimately, a language that is 5,000 year old will not be perfectly logical, and looking for neat systems has screwed up many a Chinese learner.

Keep moving and use neat tricks in passing, as they are applicable. If there are no neat tricks, don't waste your time looking for them

[hanyu_xuesheng]

This post (Self-regulating Anki settings: http://globalmaverick.org/archives/533-self-regulating-anki-settings ) explains how to set Anki options best to reduce SRS burnout and to avoid other SRS problems.

There are other good posts @ globalmaverick.org about Anki. Good read.

[valikor]

Yes, I suppose the editing time is an easily overlooked factor. If going through cards quickly, each card only takes a few seconds. So even if your method is not optimized--and will require you to see the card 10-15 times before actually internalizing it--you'll end up on top if your time spent creating the cards was minimal..

[creamyhorror]

I'm using the HSK 20,000 sentences Anki deck right now. Honestly I'm enjoying reviewing it daily, but currently (in HSK level 2 part 2) the characters are too simple and it's taking a really long time to get to my knowledge frontier due to the accumulating reviews. Some of the sentences are also too long to read quickly, defeating the purpose of an SRS (quick drilling). I don't dare skip ahead to HSK 3 or 4 for fear that I'll miss out on filling gaps in my more basic vocabulary.

Does anyone have a better deck to recommend? I don't care if it's Chinese or English definitions; I just don't have the drive to create a comprehensive deck myself. (Actually, I have a personal deck, but I only add words to it rarely.)

[imron]

I really like the theory and principles behind SRS and flashcarding, but in practice have to admit that besides occasional bursts of trying to get into it, it's never really been part of my study routine.

I guess I dislike the idea of needing to manually and continually refresh things to keep them learnt - yes I understand the theory and know that this need diminishes over time and eventually things get into your long term memory, I'm just saying I don't like the idea of it , after all, I don't need to manually review my English vocabulary like this and I'd like to think that one day my Chinese would reach the same sort of level, and so typically I prefer to get this refreshing through more natural processes such as reading, listening to radio/tv etc.

When I have used flashcards, it's been more for recording things I've looked up in pleco, and then revising them at a later date to get them entrenched well enough in memory that reading and other activities can keep them current.

Doing this might not be as efficient in terms of overall words/characters learnt, but I find that if I have time to spend on Chinese, I prefer to spend half an hour reading something rather than half an hour revising flashcards.