How many new words per day?

[aristotle1990]

I have been memorizing at least 40 new words a day in Anki for about a month now (earlier, probably about 10, 20 or so a day). My main, English/picture-to-Chinese deck gives me 30 words/sentences/phrases a day (that I add individually -- the number of new cards in my deck rarely dips below 50) -- not every single card contains a new word, but many contain several new words, so it averages out to about 30. I also do 10 new HSK words a day (Chinese to English). I am 起早贪黑地 studying Chinese in China full time -- essentially, the only breaks I take are for eating and class stuff, which ironically distracts me from real studying. (I think that class, compared with what you can do on your own, is a big waste of time.) Chinese has a tremendous number of words, and whatever your opinions on using flashcards to study, vocabulary is the limiting factor: if you lack the words, you lack the comprehension. It's that simple.

Memorizing English-to-Chinese flashcards is the best way to go about things, as I find it gives me the ability to recall the words and phrases both in conversation and in my reading. But it does take more time than memorizing from Chinese to English, which is why I do the HSK cards; despite what some say, I find that a word passively memorized as a flashcard can usually be recalled both aurally and visually.

I've never been into flashcards or SRS because I find that learning words through them only gives me a one-one mapping of a Chinese word onto an English one. That might work for a lot of proper nouns, but for most words, e.g. abstract nouns, verbs and adjectives, the Chinese collocations are often completely different from what you would expect from English.

I agree with you to a point, which is why I often memorize words as parts of phrases, rather than by themselves. However, when you're just talking about passive comprehension, I think that simply having an association with an English word helps greatly. For example, I was talking with this Chinese girl, and she started talking about how where she lives, "ao" food is, in constrast to Beijing, really popular. Now, as soon as she said "ao", I knew she was talking about 熬, a word I had memorized in my HSK deck but had never encountered in the wild -- thing is, because the definition I memorized was "v: decoct; boil; endure; hold out", I knew she meant some sort of boiled food. The rare "ao" pronunciation certainly helped, but remember, most words you memorize are at least two characters long (i.e., generally have unique pronunciations).