Does the usability of flashcard for learning vocab reach an end at some point?

[imron]

On the other handside I wonder whether I would improve my Chinese much if I would just read without adding words I dont know to my flashcards.

It will help consolidate what you know (which is in many ways equally important), but it won't necessarily help you improve, i.e. it's easy to just cruise at 95% comprehension because you mostly get everything. Unfortunately, if you do that, you'll always be stuck at the point where you mostly get everything. I've found that you have to actively keep learning new words for improvement to happen. It's a slow process, because all the effort you put into learning new words has little overall impact in terms of total comprehension e.g. the difference between 95% and 96% comprehension is a lot of work for only a 1% gain.

What you can do however to keep the looking up of new words from getting too interrupting, is rather than looking up every word, look up a word once you notice it appearing several times in whatever text(s) you are reading. It's not so hard to do, just make a mental note of the word/character and if you see it again within a short period of time, then it's probably worth learning, so add it to Pleco then. Also set yourself a limit on the number of new words you'll look up in a day, and once you go over that limit, keep reading, but just don't look up any more new words (the useful ones will repeat soon enough and you can add them on a later day). I wrote a more detailed post about this here that you might find relevant.

Regarding your flashcarding method, you sound like a prime candidate for reseting your deck and starting all over again If that seems daunting, you don't have to delete your old deck straight away, just put it aside for a week or so and create a new one for all new words to give it a test run. The thing to remember is that your ultimate purpose probably isn't to build a flashcard deck containing tens of thousands or cards - presumably your goal instead is just to be able to read Chinese. If you do decide to reset your deck, the other important thing to remember is that you need to read regularly from native materials to get repetition of vocab you already know. Reading is your natural repetition process. If you're not reading, it's like you've ignored your flashcarding for a day, and before long words will start to fall off your forgetting index at a rate faster than what you're adding them, with the end result being a net loss of your reading ability.

[Kongming21]

Thanks a lot for your advice. As for resetting my flashcard deck, I do this regularly, actually I just did create a new deck two weeks ago.

Regarding the reading I have question though. What would you think would be an appropriate amount per day? As I am majoring in Chinese studies, I have made it a habit of mine to do a two or three hours of flashcard revision every day, but have neglegted reading. Now that I realize that I have to start to read more I am unsure though how much would be enough to achieve the kind of natural repitition you talk about. I know that this is probably difficulat to answer, but rather than wanting to know an exact amount of time, I would be more interested in what kind of ratio betweem time spent on doint flashcarda and time reading would be most beneficial for one's learning process.

[imron]

I think a minimum of 1/2 an hour of reading a day is a good amount. This is irrespective of level (assuming a minimum level of being able to begin reading native materials), because you should firstly be choosing material that is at or only slightly above your current level (and therefore covering repetition of vocab you already know), and secondly because as you improve you will find your reading speed also improves and so this 1/2 an hour will actually allow you to do more reading as you get better. Initially I also found it quite difficult to read for periods longer than this, but as you get better, you will also find it easier to read for longer periods.

Regarding ratios, I think it's important to spend at least as much time reading as on flashcard revision (with a preference for more reading). This means needing to keep close control of deck size and the number of new words added. Obviously each person will have a different amount of time they can spend each day on studying, but I've found that if I'm in vocab learning mode, adding around 5-10 words per day keeps things at a comfortable level for me (not a full-time student). It's important that once you've set a quota, you resist the temptation to go over it (even if it's just one more). The word will come up again if it is useful and if you are doing enough reading, but if you begin adding extra ones, this will start to push out the time you need to spend on flashcarding. In the beginning you won't find it much of an issue, but as the deck gets bigger, all those extra one words will accumulate and come back to bite you. This will mean that for the first few days/week after each reset, you'll end up having very few flashcards to go through, and you can compensate this with extra reading (or re-reading of what you have already read).

[Silent]

Regarding your flashcarding method, you sound like a prime candidate for reseting your deck and starting all over again

I know by now that you 'like' to reset your deck every once in a while. I've given it consideration as at least some of your reasoning behind it sounds very fair to me. After some thought I however believe that it's not the best solution for the problem of ever growing decks.

By resetting the deck you also loose the cards that you learned only partially. You say they will be added again if they're important which of course is true. You can never be entirely sure, but if you think the word is not that important, why add it to the deck in the first place? By resetting the deck you learn it half, throw it away and loose it only to start learning it again later. Isn't it better to learn the words added properly and keep the deck in check by throwing away the words you 'really' know? What 'really know' means is arbitrary. You might choose to throw everything away that has an interval of over 1 year, or 3 months or .... depending on the goals you set yourself. You will loose the words that weren't important, but the words that were important are only studied once and the natural repetition will make sure that it will remain with you.

[jkhsu]

@Kongming21

Thank you for responding. First of all, congrats on getting to the newspaper level in 3 years. You're on a bit faster pace than a standard college program for a Chinese major. And even then, they'd still have to work pretty hard to get to this level. Second, I'm not at your level yet (can't read newspapers) so you can take my comments with a grain of salt. However, the reason why this topic interests me is because I would like to avoid this problem myself. Like I said before, I have not used flash cards at all to get to the, I would estimate, middle of a 3rd year equivalent college level for a Chinese major. I started with community college classes then self learning. I'm old school and was just recently introduced to SRS software by this forum. I have been putting words that I don't know in Anki but haven't really actively started flipping through them yet as I have too many textbooks to get through at this point. That said, here are my questions / thoughts:

1. Based on the problem you're having I am assuming the following:

- You are learning Chinese outside of China.

- You do not have a job that requires you to read, speak and present in Chinese.

- You are mostly learning through reading.

If I assumed wrong, please correct me.

2. Are you doing any of the following in addition to reading?

a.) Daily composition - For example participating in Chinese forums (中文角 here) where you are reading and responding to posts or doing some type of writing (on a computer is fine) where you can utilize what you've learned on a daily basis.

b.) Watching Chinese language programming on a daily basis with subtitles. This includes the news as well as TV series, movies, etc.

c.) Spending part of the day talking to a Chinese speaker about various topics.

e.) Using a Chinese-Chinese dictionary and using Chinese words to describe the meaning of other Chinese words. (I'm old school and am still using the old PCR as one of my texts. Books 5 and 6 have no English in them at all. All vocab are defined in Chinese. There must be a reason why they do this.)

At your level, you should be doing all of the above because this mirrors what a native in China would be doing (when they are learning Chinese as a kid) and that's why they don't have the flash card crutch. I know it's hard to do this outside of China (I've got another post just about that) but it can be done. If I had to pick I'd stay do (a) and (e). Try to get the feelings of words based on context and be able to describe them in Chinese and then use those words in your own compositions.

[jkhsu]

As I am majoring in Chinese studies, I have made it a habit of mine to do a two or three hours of flashcard revision every day

First, apologies in my previous post as I didn't realize you were a Chinese major but my points are still valid. The problem is you're trying to learn words via flash cards (probably because of tests, etc.) in the hopes to cut down the time to learn new words vs spending the right amount of time reading. I spend all my time reading until I know every word. Because I am not in school and don't have tests, I don't review words I haven't seen somewhere. My problem is not doing enough composition to get those words to stick but I'll worry about it a bit later.

[imron]

You can never be entirely sure

After starting to do lots of reading, and seeing words I thought I'd never see used again pop up all over the place, I am sure enough. Besides, let's say that in an entire year of reading (which for me last year included some 17 books totalling over 4 million characters), if a word I'd only partially learnt before never turns up again, is it worth me putting in time and effort to learn a word that I'll never see and never use, especially when there are many others that do repeat? I'd prefer to concentrate on words that I'm likely to encounter in my regular usage of the language, i.e. words that are important to me.

but if you think the word is not that important, why add it to the deck in the first place?

I guess it comes down to thinking vs knowing. You might think a word is or is not important, but how do you know? And how do you define what 'important' is. To me, in the context of learning new vocab 'important' means something that I'm likely to come across when reading/using Chinese, with a higher weighting given to words that are likely to appear more often in the stuff I'm reading. What is important to one person, will be different from another, after all, if you read news articles, the vocab required will be different than if you are reading Wuxia novels, and different again from if you are reading Internet forums or blog posts and so on, so how do you prioritize which words to learn first and which words are important to you?

Sure there are HSK lists and character frequency lists, and public decks that other people have built up, but these are only approximations and may not be a good fit for the Chinese that you will encounter. If you are not doing regular reading, it's really difficult to know for sure, but if you are doing regular reading it will quickly become apparent which words are both commonly occurring and not yet known by you. Therefore I prefer to focus my vocab learning strategy on words that appear more often in the stuff that I'm reading, and not be too bothered about words that don't appear, or appear too infrequently.

Isn't it better to learn the words added properly and keep the deck in check by throwing away the words you 'really' know?

Even if you were 'properly' learning them then I would still think the time and effort spent in trying to maintain the perfect size deck that only contained words you didn't yet know properly, would be put to better use on other activities. Reseting the deck is quick, and I haven't found any of the drawbacks you mentioned.

Let's also look though at what it means to 'properly' learn a word. Given the number of comments I've seen saying someone knows a word when doing the flashcard, but when they encounter it in real life they are stumped, or people saying that 10% forgetting rate is optimum for flashcard usage, I'm still not convinced that focusing on SRSing will let you 'properly' learn a word. What I'm suggesting doesn't necessarily let you 'properly' learn a word either, the difference is however that it takes the view that it's ok to forget things, because in practice, you'll only be forgetting things you never need to use.

[imron]

I have been putting words that I don't know in Anki but haven't really actively started flipping through them yet as I have too many textbooks to get through at this point

To me, this seems a little counterproductive. Firstly because you're spending time adding cards to Anki but not going through them, and therefore you're putting in effort but not getting any of the benefits. Secondly, personally I find flashcards to be most useful the closer in time it is to when you encounter a given word, because you have context to help you remember, and each time you revise the card it's also quite easy to remember the context also.

To avoid the crutch of flashcarding, reset the deck and start again. This way you are using flashcards to drill a word into short/mid-term memory, and then using usage of that word to make it stick long-term.

Using a Chinese-Chinese dictionary and using Chinese words to describe the meaning of other Chinese words

I am also a big fan of this approach. I've been using a Chinese-Chinese dictionary since very early on in my Chinese learning, and all the vocab learning/flashcarding I do is Chinese-Chinese.

[jkhsu]

To avoid the crutch of flashcarding, reset the deck and start again. This way you are using flashcards to drill a word into short/mid-term memory, and then using usage of that word to make it stick long-term.

Thanks, this is a very good point. I guess by leaving the deck alone, I am actually building a crutch because I know it's there. I also read you post from last year on remember advanced vocab. What a great post. You can publish a book on this topic. Although I hate flash cards, I can completely see how it should be used in the context of reading and how you won't improve unless you learn new words. No pain no gain, but in the least painful way possible.

Besides, let's say that in an entire year of reading (which for me last year included some 17 books totalling over 4 million characters)

How long did it take for you to get to this level?

[imron]

I've been learning Chinese now for over 10 years - 6 of those were living in China, but only 1 of those was full-time studying. I would say I would have been able to be at that point after maybe 3-4 years in to my studies if I had made a decision then to do more reading (though maybe initially I wouldn't have been able to read as much). It was really only last year that I started making a concentrated effort on reading longer texts, and I definitely found it slow going at first, but then like everything, it got better with practice. So far this year, I'm about 10 books in (totalling almost 3 million characters).

Although I hate flash cards, I can completely see how it should be used in the context of reading and how you won't improve unless you learn new words.

I think flashcards are a great tool for drilling vocab. I also think drilling vocab is a necessary evil if you want to improve your reading skills - it's not fun but if you don't do it you won't make as much progress. However my end goal is not to drill vocab but to be able to read Chinese, so I try to focus more on the end goal rather than the tool.

[Silent]

I guess it comes down to thinking vs knowing. You might think a word is or is not important, but how do you know?

I don't really want to go into discussion about what is important and what not. In my perception it's hard to judge. Only 'after the fact' when it keeps showing up you're sure. My point is you make a judgement call and add it to the deck. You may get new insights and decide it's not. But deleting the entire deck is overkill in that situation. Essentially when added to the deck I see only three reasons why to delete it again.

- new insight, it's not important (I don't really know how to judge, but still...)

- you know it (to a certain level)

- for some reason you're 'unable' to learn it, it takes far too much time to learn it so it's better to drop it and learn a couple of others instead.

Even if you were 'properly' learning them then I would still think the time and effort spent in trying to maintain the perfect size deck that only contained words you didn't yet know properly, would be put to better use on other activities. Reseting the deck is quick, and I haven't found any of the drawbacks you mentioned.

To me this makes no sense. Sorting on interval and delete everything that exceeds a certain value takes barely more effort then deleting the entire deck and it saves the time of re-adding the same words again. In the long run it might be less work.

[imron]

Sorting on interval and delete everything that exceeds a certain value takes barely more effort then deleting the entire deck

Possibly, but what about words above that interval that have been forgotten? Looking at other posts and comments, people seem to range between 85-95% in how well they have learnt a given deck (with 90% being quoted as an optimum value), so even if you choose an interval, there will still be words you don't know getting deleted - unless you put in more time to go through the words above that interval to figure out which ones you can happily delete. The other thing that will take time is deciding what the value of that interval is. Once you start to accept the principle that deleting some words you don't know is ok, it's not much further a stretch to just accept it's ok to delete them all

saves the time of re-adding the same words again.

If you use something like Pleco, adding a new word is basically instant. I spend zero time managing/creating flashcard decks.

I realise that many people will feel apprehensive about deleting a deck - I remember feeling the same when I first started to do this (at the time I had a deck of around 1,000 cards), but if you're feeling some sort of attachment to your deck, to me that's a good warning sign that you're starting to use that as a crutch. Deleting everything and starting again also isn't as drastic as it seems - but it's difficult to see this until you've done it As I've mentioned before though, the important thing is to make sure that if you do this you supplement your learning with enough reading to get your repetitions in. If you delete the deck, and then just start building it up again with flashcarding as the focus of your studies, then I agree it will probably do more harm than good.

[Guest realmayo]

There's no way I'm going to delete my deck -- at least not until my reading level is much higher. The reason is this: at my current level the majority of what I read is not particularly complex, so more advanced words I come across now I might not often see again in my current choice of reading. But who's to say that if in a year's time I'm reading more complex material I won't find this word cropping up regularly enough? So, only once I'm at a high enough level where my regular reading is at about a complex level as it's ever going to be, can I start considering imron's radical approach :unsure: .

What I do find worthwhile is to be quite ruthless about the "suspend" function: if I keep getting some not-too-important word wrong, and never seem to come across it in real life, I'll suspend it -- I don't want to waste time on hard-to-remember words that aren't important. But I won't delete it: suspending it means that if later on I come across it again and think it's a word I've not seen before, when I try to enter it into my deck I'll see it there already and can then decide whether to relearn it and then unsuspend it, or to keep it tucked away hidden for a while longer.

[Silent]

Possibly, but what about words above that interval that have been forgotten? Looking at other posts and comments, people seem to range between 85-95% in how well they have learnt a given deck (with 90% being quoted as an optimum value), so even if you choose an interval, there will still be words you don't know getting deleted - unless you put in more time to go through the words above that interval to figure out which ones you can happily delete. The other thing that will take time is deciding what the value of that interval is.

Now I've to defend what other people state? The only point I try to make is that I see no rationale in adding a word, look at it a couple of times and then say "it may be important but I stop learning it anyway".

I think the 85-95% range is for mature cards. Anki marks them as mature if the interval reaches 21 days, this interval may be reached after seeing the word only a couple of times if you choose the easy button every time the word shows up. In my perception are the maturity date and retention rate completely random numbers. Wait a few days more or less and the retention rate may change dramatic.

As I said before, you've to study the words to such an extent that suits your learning goals. If you feel there's no need to learn words that show up less than once a month you study it till you remember the word confidently after one month. So depending on the settings you may decide to delete everything that has an interval from 2 or 3 months or higher. If you feel you need to retain every word you learn for years even if you don't see it in your reading you may set it to ten years or so. There is no perfect, suit all answer. It's a matter of setting goals and act/study accordingly. I'ld say set the interval from where to delete to 2-3 times the interval you want to retain the word. That way you will have remembered it once after that time (unless you keep pushing the easy button). Don't make it harder than it really is.

[jkhsu]

So, only once I'm at a high enough level where my regular reading is at about a complex level as it's ever going to be, can I start considering imron's radical approach

I don't think imron's approach is radical at all. You know what's radical, I have never used flash cards and was able to get through the new HSK 4 just fine. All I did was read. If it's worked for me from 0-4 why not 5-6? I am not advocating not using flash cards as I agree with imron that you need to be learning new words and flash cards help with short / mid term memory until you have learned those words through reading or composition (writing and speech).

Also, I don't think everyone is on agreement with the end goal. If you like flash cards and/or always want to have a set of words that you rarely see or use in either your readings or composition (writing and speech), then yes, continue to use the flash cards as you have done. As I've said before, all of us can use a set of esoteric English flash cards for words that we rarely encounter except when reading difficult novels and publications. If that's fine with you, then so be it.

I think imron's approach of using flash cards to supplement your current reading so that you don't waste time looking up the same words over and using the reading to actually remember those words in long term memory is a perfect balance. He's clearly gotten to the level that he's at by using this method.

[Guest realmayo]

jkhsu, you don't understand how SRS-flashcards work. There's lots on the forums about them. They're not designed for short-term memory.

[imron]

realmayo, not all flashcard software requires that you use SRS. I use non-SRS flashcarding all the time for getting stuff into short/mid-term memory.

[Guest realmayo]

Oh I see well fair enough, but I think the OP was talking about an SRS system. What you're talking about is not much different from writing a list of new words and running through it every day for a few days until you feel you've learned them -- certainly nothing wrong with that, it's how I learn words before I put them into my SRS, but in that case we're talking about a topic more like "Does learning new vocab reach an end at some point, or do you just start picking it up?".

[imron]

Oh I see well fair enough, but I think the OP was talking about an SRS system

I'm not so sure. See post #20.

I think there's certainly a fair amount of overlap between standard flashcards and SRS flashcards though, and personally I tend to do a mix of both - drilling words with normal flashcards to get them into short-term memory, and then letting an SRS handle them for a bit (maybe a couple months), before deleting the deck and starting again.

[jkhsu]

jkhsu, you don't understand how SRS-flashcards work.

That was true a few weeks ago when members in this forum introduced me to it. However, I've since tried them and understand exactly how they work. I think imron and I are pretty much in agreement that the best and most fun way to keep up and learn Chinese is through reading. My personal opinion is that flash cards, SRS or not, should really only be used to help you get you through your current level of reading. If you are trying to use flash cards to remember words that you don't see in your current reading and that you don't use in your daily life, why are you trying to learn them now? To get through a test perhaps? At any point, I can easily stuff more than a thousand words I don't know and that I currently don't see in my readings into an SRS program, but why? Now, if you really like doing SRS vs reading and that's a hobby for you that you'd like to continue forever, that's fine. I am just coming in with the viewpoint that people would like to get off of that crutch at some point.

Way back before there were SRS programs, I remember the only time I had used flash cards was to study for the SAT test. I also clearly remember my friends who were prolific readers (unfortunately, I was not one of them) scored higher than me in the SAT without having to use flash cards. They not only knew more words but were just better than me in English period through reading more books. I also know that there are many Chinese students now who use SRS and flash cards to pass various English exams so they can attend school in the USA. Many of them score higher than native English speakers here but when you actually meet them, you realize they were just great at learning words for exams and can't really hold a conversation or comprehend words they thought they knew when used in different context.