Traditional Character Flashcards

[FangShi]

Hey guys,

I am studying in Taiwan right now with the Chinese Practical Chinese Visual Audio Series.

I am in book 4 now and because I am to fuckn lazy to write my own flashcards I want to finally start working with a flashcard software, because I desperately need to start regular review of my fast growing vocabulary.

Does anyone know where I either find the vocabulary from the 5 books from the CPVA series as input for a flashcard program OR the Test Of Proficiency-Huayu (SC-TOP) Vocab List?

Which program would you guys recommend for daily vocab review?

I want to write the words out on paper anyway, but would be awesome to use a software so I can save the time of writing thousands of flashcards...

Or maybe actual physical printed flashcards with like the first 3000 words?

[renzhe]

Use either Anki or Mnemosyne (google them). Both implement spaced repetition, which is a godsend, and both have extensive Chinese vocabularies.

There are other popular flashcard programs, some specialised for Chinese, with special features, but make sure that whatever you use implements spaced repetition.

There are most common character lists out there, and there is the HSK vocabulary (which is outdated, but still a good quick approximation for the vocab you must know). I've never seen a TOP vocab list, I don't know if such a thing exists.

But both HSK and TOP are general proficiency tests, and while there are differences between the Mainland and Taiwan standards, most of the basic vocab is the same. The Mnemosyne HSK deck also has a traditional character version, which includes some common Taiwanese variations of common vocabulary (for example 脚踏车 in addition to 自行车), it was provided by a poster here.

In addition to this, http://www.hskflashcards.com/ have a number of flashcard lists for download, including the vocabulary from several popular textbooks (not yours, though). You can download them in paper format (for printing), or in CSV format, which can be loaded by any flashcard program, including the ones I mentioned.

Also, searching this site for flashcard discussions will give you some more info.

[Mouseneb]

Skritter for sure.

[FangShi]

@renzhe: Awesome man. Thanks for the detailed answer. Appriciated.

I decided to go with the Mnemosyne software, I already found the cards for the New Chinese Practical Reader, I work with in Germany. I have to return in summer anyway and continue there with book 5. They have the vocab for 1-4 which is awesome for me to repeat it before I come back.

Anyway, more important for me is the list for the TOP or HSK deck you were refering to, as including typical Taiwanese words like 腳踏車. Were can I find this deck?

Another question: Is there any good site or book, with hundereds of sentences?

I pick up some books for english learners here in Taiwan and I found them awesome for learning the other way around also. There are books like "The 3000 most frequent English words" and they provide a sentence in English and a Chinese translation for every word.

Just going through them is a awesome practice to learn new words in context and get more used to its application.

The CHinese books just don't contain Pinyin, so I was looking for sentences geared toward Chinese learners.

[chrix]

Anki does have an easy way of finding shared decks (though I don't know anything about mnemosyne, and most shared decks are about the HSK, not the TOP, though there was one "Taiwan Mandarin" set). Anki also has pinyin toolkit, a plugin that automatically looks up the pronunciation and meaning of words, in English or German (and can convert between jiantizi and fantizi)...

[renzhe]

Anyway, more important for me is the list for the TOP or HSK deck you were refering to, as including typical Taiwanese words like 腳踏車. Were can I find this deck?

http://www.mnemosyne-proj.org/node/30

Keep in mind that it's an HSK vocab list (not comprehensive though), but the person who did the simplified->traditional conversion added a list of common Taiwanese terms on top of the existing Mainland terms to the traditional version.

At the very least, doing the first 2-3 levels is something that's recommended for anyone trying to get to an intermediate level in Chinese.

Anki does have an easy way of finding shared decks

So does Mnemosyne. Go the their webpage and click on "Cards and Plugins".

[chrix]

Is this the same as the HSK set available on anki (probably not, as the one I have doesn't have Taiwan-specific terms, do you have a list of just such terms?)? Anyways, I've been working with that HSK list, and it does have terms that are not used in Taiwan, and that can lead to problems when communicating with Taiwanese people.

One of these days I'm gonna start a thread about this...

[renzhe]

I don't know if it's the same, it was the one of the first user-contributed Mnemosyne decks back in the day, and Anki can (could?) load Mnemosyne decks. I haven't compared them.

Even if now, the vocab should be the same because they come from the same source. Definition should be similar, because they are both likely automatically generated from CC-CEDICT. The traditional character version was contributed by an external contributor who ran the whole thing through a particularly clever word-based Excel converter and did a quick check of the results. He also added some common Taiwanese Guoyu terms like 计程车 and 脚踏车 at the same time to make it more useful for people in Taiwan, but I don't have all the details.

The HSK list is basically for preparing for the HSK, but in the absence of a better general-purpose vocabulary, it's the best vocab list I'm aware of.

[FangShi]

Excellent, I downloaded Mnemosyne as well as Anki and I am very fond of both programs so far!

Installation and import of card decks is really easy and convinent.

I decided to start with Mnemosyne and use the HSK Traditional Deck renzhe (Ninja?=)) recommended.

One question left: Mnemosyne displays the characters extremly small, I can hardly see them. Is there any way I can enlarge the fond? Thanks. ;)

As well as:

The default setting is, that Mnemosyne shows me the character and I write down the english translation.

Can I change it, so that I am showed the English meaning and write down the character, because my purpose of learning is more the ability to remember characters in writing, not character recognition.

Also is there a way to automatically translate it into German (probably not). My English is good enough, still I always think its better to learn in your mothertongue!?

Also: In Anki I can set a certain workload per day, like 15 words a day or something. Can I do that with Mnemosyne? Or do I just as many words as I feel like and than go out?

Do I have to SAVE at the end of each session for the program to work intelligently?

How will the program work: If I do 15 words a day, will it add 15 new words everyday + repeat the old ones? Because the HSK set has over 9000 words (!!!). I probably now around 2000 characters right now... is it really a good idea to start learning with such an gigantic set of cards? I mean I want to learn the HSK vocabulary eventually, so should I just go with it? It seems to be characters and words mixed anyway, so probably its just around ~3000 single characters + character combinations/words, dui bu dui?

Which way do you guys learn?

Edited April 19, 2010 at 04:00 PM by FangShi

[renzhe]

One question left: Mnemosyne displays the characters extremly small, I can hardly see them. Is there any way I can enlarge the fond? Thanks. ;)

In the settings dialog, there is an option to "increase the font size for non-Latin characters". Pump that up to 20 or so.

Can I change it, so that I am showed the English meaning and write down the character, because my purpose of learning is more the ability to remember characters in writing, not character recognition.

You can go to the "Edit Deck" dialog, mark all the cards and say "Create Vice-Versa" or something to that effect. I think Anki forces you to do both directions by default.

Do I have to SAVE at the end of each session for the program to work intelligently?

Mnemosyne will save automatically every time you close it. I believe Anki does the same.

My English is good enough, still I always think its better to learn in your mothertongue!?

In principle yeah, but the best way is to learn in the target language -- Chinese. You get this by reading words in context and lots of exposure. In the meantime, English is probably better than automatically translated German which is bound to contain errors.

How will the program work: If I do 15 words a day, will it add 15 new words everyday + repeat the old ones?

It will work like this -- the program will prepare a list of cards for you to review each day. These cards are that you have learned before and which you are likely to forget. You start by going through those cards. In the beginning, this won't be many, but it will grow with time.

Then you work on learning new cards as much as you want to. The program will present you with a random set to go through and try to memorise.

If you go psycho and learn 200 words every day, you'll find that you'll have lots of stuff to review. Use it for a while and you'll develop a feel for how much you can handle while still remembering the stuff from before.

Also, learn to use categories (at least in Mnemosyne). You can switch on the words from HSK-A (the easy ones) and go through those first. You don't need to have 9000 cards staring at you. You can turn on more difficult categories as you progress.

[chrix]

As I said there is a way with Anki to have words translated into German. pinyin toolkit can use Handedict instead of CEDICT for that (and AFAIK words not in the dictionary are translated through Google Translate). But for any kind of automated translation, mistakes are bound to happen. So if your Chinese level is still too low to notice these kinds of mistakes, you should probably stick to carefully edited shared decks...

[FangShi]

renzhe, you are awesome man. Thanks so much.

Switching on the categories is exactly what I was looking for. I personally think learning stand alone characters is totally useless, so I will now only switch on the categories HSK words 1 and later 2 + 3.

I was just about to make handwritten word cards the other day, I cant believe how much time I saved now PLUS the big bonus of a good algorithm for repetition that easily beats my clumsy attempt to repeat words on handwritten flashcards in an efficient manner.

This really feels like a genuine key to my improvement in Chinese and I am very thrilled about integrating 45 min. of word repetition in my daily routine.

@chrix: Cheers mate, but I think I will work with Mnemosyne for now. It feels more suitable for me.

Only one more question: Anyone has a good deck of whole SENTENCES to practice patterns and grammatical structures and words in context? I think I saw one on Anki, but maybe you guys have one that you can recommend (traditional characters would be preferable.).

[renzhe]

I personally think learning stand alone characters is totally useless, so I will now only switch on the categories HSK words 1 and later 2 + 3.

Keep in mind that some of the "characters" in the HSK set are actually single-character words which can be used on their own.

Perhaps a good approach would be to learn the HSK-A words first, then go through the characters -- you'll get a clearer picture of what the characters mean in isolation, and learn some single-character words on top of it.

[calibre2001]

I personally think learning stand alone characters is totally useless

I think this is true for those starting out where acquisition of words rather than characters is more important. However as one progresses, it's going to be the residual & obscure characters that have to be learnt rather than words. So I think here is where single characters play more prominence. I guess that's why the chinese judge ability by how many characters one know rather than words.

Edited April 20, 2010 at 02:12 PM by calibre2001

[FangShi]

I just stumbled upon this website: http://www.yellowbridge.com/chinese/flashcards.php

I totally hate their flashcard software and I think it sucks compared to Anni and Mnemosyne, but I like their decks, because they have the complete New Practical Chinese Reader series, HSK AND TOP list!

Everything available in traditional characters and with voice function (if you pay(!) for their premium offer), were the words are spoken (sounds rather bad so, because its just the pronunciation for the individual characters, doesn't sound fluid.).

Anyway, I worked through the New Practical Chinese Reader series before and I totally want to review their vocabulary as well as the TOP vocabulary.

Anybody expirienced with this website/software? Is their any way to put these decks on Mnemosyne/Anki?

I really like how they have complete decks for alot of major textbooks PLUS HSK and TOP. Anki and Mnemosyne decks seem a little more "random". Or maybe I just didn't find the textbook decks?

One more question regarding Mnemosyne:

I have imported like 5 decks now. In Anki I can choose which deck I want to work with that day, is it correct that Mnemosyne only gives me the option to active/deactivate the decks I want to work/don't want to work with?

I thought that is limited to a deck and than I can active certain lections/categories, but the only way I can choose a certain deck/its part is through the "activate category" buttom.

I think Ankis interface is better designed in this regard.

Edited April 20, 2010 at 02:21 PM by FangShi