1,500 words in 30 days

[yersi]

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[imron]

I just finished my first professional novel translation last month

You can't just make a comment like that without at least letting us know the name of the novel I'm sure there'd be others interested too (feel free to start another thread about it to avoid derailing this one).

[yersi]

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[imron]

Out of curiosity, what language(s) are you translating into?

[yersi]

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[jbradfor]

I don't know if it warrants its own thread though, seems a bit like ego-stroking to me?

At least a mention in the Aims and Progress thread.... Inspire us all!

[yersi]

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[yersi]

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[murrayjames]

Haha. I'm still wondering how poor kongli is holding up with his 50 words/day

Music (not Chinese) is what I do professionally. I realized long ago, in music, that the most interesting approaches to music are those that differ--often radically--from my own. These kinds of people are the ones who really teach me shit. These kinds of people are the ones I want in my band. But that's perhaps a too catholic way of looking at things. Plus irenicism is boring.

The proof is in the pudding, they say. Which is why when folks like renzhe and yersi and imron and skylee and roddy and heifeng and [...] speak, I listen.

Ok.

[renzhe]

Which is why when folks like renzhe and yersi and imron and skylee and roddy and heifeng and [...] speak, I listen.

I'm nowhere near as good as these people. I've just found that cramming helped me get over a hopeless plateau. It's a useful tool when used responsibly.

[kongli]

Hello all,

Taking a train to Shanghai tonight so figured I should respond to this thread since the supposed end date is tomorrow. Well, as I am sure you have already guest....I failed. It went okay the first 10 or so days but after that I just felt I was spending practically all my time memorizing words and not doing other potentially helpful exercises. Well that and I figured out I am pretty lazy . However I will say this, I was surprised at the amount of words I was able to keep in my head 4-5 days after learning them. I am going to keep trying to do heavy memorization but probably somewhere along the order of 20-25 words a day. I think this was an awakining for me that I could be learning words at a slightly faster pace....but not 50 a day. I got up to around 700 though and could do those with around 85% accuracy. Also, the exercise helped me realize that I want and should be doing a lot more reading. After about the first week I was having a lot more success casually reading a magazine that I was pulling words from. So I think it helps to pull words from selected sources and then review them not only with flashcards but also by reading and rereading articles.

Anyway, thanks for all those that contribute, sorry I didn't do more to keep this alive but I still think it was good exercise for myself. Also sorry for the jumbled post, a lot things that I am sure people already know but were just more reinforced for myself.

@Yersi: You win this round ;)

[imron]

So I think it helps to pull words from selected sources and then review them not only with flashcards but also by reading and rereading articles.

I agree with this 100%.

[LyYenKhang]

I've officially started the 50 per day 4 days ago. I am now up to 200 characters, not counting probably close to 100 more than I recognize even though I have not yet reached them in my official "program". I'd say I recognize about 90% of the characters I've learned so far. Although I only memorize the strokes for a small percent.

Its traditional characters.

[mike39]

So how did this work out! I wanted to ask you if you hit your goal, but I forgot for a while. How is your new 1500 extra word vocabulary working out?

[Tiana]

I've officially started the 50 per day 4 days ago. I am now up to 200 characters

It sounds like you're talking about characters, not words. Do you learn characters on their own? If so, this will be very difficult to remember in the abstract but if you learn 50 characters through words, the plan seems very ambitious because you'll have to remember the words as well, and I wonder if it's practical at all. Slow down and aim for a longer term plan is what I would say.

[Glenn]

Do you learn characters on their own? If so, this will be very difficult to remember in the abstract

I didn't think so. I learned the vast majority of the characters I know on their own first, and without readings. I found they stuck much better than the other way.

[neverending]

I just found this topic, and while I'm aware it's quite old now, I thought I'd have something to add.

I learned 1400 words at the start of my Chinese learning in the space of 40 days, using memrise.com's SRS - I spent about an 90 minutes a day on vocab learning for the first couple of weeks (I learned 500 words in my first week), tapering down to 30 minutes by the end of the 40 days. This took me through the HSK3 vocab list, partway through HSK4, and some extra words I'd taken from my reading material. After the 40 days, I had to spend about 30 minutes on SRS maintenance a day, until it eventually cut down to around 10 minutes a day 2 months later (at which point I started piling on new vocabulary.)

I'd say it was both a good and bad idea.

Good - It gave me, from scratch, the ability to read things like Chinese Breeze ok. I did have to learn a lot of grammar while doing that reading, and a lot of the words I didn't truly understand until I'd seen them in context, but most words I learned quite well. It gave me a numerical indicator of my progress, which is very satisfying! I did manage to retain above 80% of the words for months afterwards (meaning/pronunciation recall) - even those I didn't encounter in my reading.

Bad - I wasted time learning words that I wasn't going to start using until months later. In retrospect it would have been more efficient to learn words as I encountered them in context, which is what I mostly do nowadays. Certain words I shouldn't have learned using this method at all, like 了, 就 or 被. After I finished the 1400 words, I was quite tired, and learned only 400 more over the next 4 months. I'm pretty sure I could have learned more if I'd sustained a more moderate learning pace over 5 months instead.

[paotale]

can be done. although the test that comes 6 months later may be a different story

'

[neverending]

can be done. although the test that comes 6 months later may be a different story

A popular thing to say in this thread, but I'm not sure why - in the post right above yours I said that months later I could still recognise >80% of the words that I *hadn't* been using in my reading. If one uses a decent SRS to maintain the words for the full 6 months, or one occupies one's time with other appropriate learning activities, why should there be a significant decline in the recognition of words?

There are of course, other caveats. If someone says he can "learn 1500 words in 1 month", he is probably not using a very strict definition of "learn". In my opinion, a word is not fully learned till it can be easily used - or at least recognised - in fluent conversation, and this is more than flashcarding alone can achieve. Achieving a fluent vocabulary is much more difficult and time-consuming than achieving an "in-head dictionary", as I like to think of it. In my post above, I talk about learning 1400 words in 40 days, but of course to convert that vocabulary into a useful form took many additional hours of reading and listening practice.

Anyway, simple flashcard recognition/recall, even over months, is practically a trivial task nowadays, what with all the technology floating around to help us. Cramming a great deal of words at once may have its disadvantages, but forgetting all of the words afterwards needn't be one of them.

[querido]

To neverending:

This step up from the "in-head dictionary" to useable language is so big and takes so much additional work, that once I've done that work I am always thinking in hindsight that the flashcarding part was a relative triviality, or was sort of beside the point.

Do you sometimes think this?