Advice on organizing/keeping track of my vocabularly

[ChTTay]

Hey All,

At the moment I am studying Chinese using Integrated Chinese (Level 1 Part 1). After each lesson, I add the new vocabulary to my I.C deck in ANKI. I review every day on my phone, usually on the bus or during breaks at work.

Any other new vocabulary I just have in a messy notebook. This usually consists of words/phrases that I will need soon (e.g. I'm going to get a haircut), Chinese that I come across out and about in China or something I say in English often but think it would be a good idea to stary saying in Chinese instead.

The note book is good for recording vocab there and then ... but what should I do with it afterward? Should I start one deck in ANKI just for words I pick up or try to catagorize them in different decks? If they are in ANKI, I would end up learning the character for each too. Do you think this would slow down how quickly I learn the words orally? Also, If I put them in ANKI but find they aren't really "keepers" should I just delete them?

Sorry if that last paragraph is just a long train of thought. They are some of the questions floating round my head right now.

I also would like to try and get some kind of "system" down now as I am due to start studying at 清华大学 this fall. I would like to try and be as organized as I can while studying.

Thanks for any advice or anecdotes

Chris

[Guest realmayo]

I'm pretty sure there's no right way and it's more a case of trial & error and working out what works best for you, but I understand why you'd post the question because there's the possibility of wasting a lot of time and energy going off down the wrong track.

I use Anki in two slightly different ways. For memorising characters and for remembering vocab. I have two separate decks, though some people reckon there's no problem having everything in one deck.

For characters, you've just got to learn the things (while taking advantage of various techniques to improve that, such as mnemonics or whatever).

But for the bulk of vocabulary, a mistake I made was to shove new words into Anki without really thinking about them. I'd see a new word somewhere, write it down, a bit later I'd put it into Anki, and maybe a week or two after that I'd review it in Anki for the first time -- by which time I'd forgotten where I'd seen this word in the first place. I'd lost the connection. So starting to learn this word was little different to picking a random word from a dictionary. And this way of learning new words didn't work well for me. Too abstract, no connection with my experience of real-life using the language.

In your case, the words you're seeing in your textbook shouldn't give you this problem -- because they're part of a lesson, you should have some context and understanding of how they're used. As for the words you put down in your notebook, if I were you, before I put one of those into Anki I'd ask yourself if you can remember where you came across this word, and if you are reasonably confident you understand it and know how to use it. If so, add it to Anki. But if you've already forgotten those details, don't bother -- unless you've got a real strong reason for wanting to learn it (in which case you already have a connection, a hook, for this word).

The other thing to consider is quantity: if you find you're comfortable with seeing on average, say, 10 or 20 new words per day in Anki, then don't add much more than or you'll get a big backlog with the result that you've completely forgotten all about a word you entered before you even get to review it in Anki for the first time.

For your other questions: I wouldn't fuss too much about different decks in Anki, though it's not a bad idea to use the tags -- that gives you flexibility to alter your approach in the future (for example, if you wanted to concentrate only on the stuff from your textbook).

If you come across a word with a character you haven't learned yet, personally I'd put effort into learning that character too, but lots of people would say there's no need.

Definitely no problem with deleting words you don't want to keep learning (though I tend to just suspend them instead).

But my main point is, if you have a decent quantity of new words you want to learn, I recommend being confident you understand them before you start Anki-ing them .... I treat my vocab deck as a tool to stop me forgetting words, rather than for learning words. (Though that wasn't the case for learning individual characters, where I treat it more like a memorisation exercise.)

[abcdefg]

Any other new vocabulary I just have in a messy notebook. This usually consists of words/phrases that I will need soon (e.g. I'm going to get a haircut), Chinese that I come across out and about in China or something I say in English often but think it would be a good idea to stary saying in Chinese instead.

I use the "small notebook" method and keep one with me all the time. Periodically, usually on weekends, I go through it and transfer things that look like they might be useful to know into ZDT. I review them until I know them. Periodically, maybe once a month, I select the "keepers" from these files and put them into Anki for long term spaced recall retention.

(Note: I could probably just use two different Anki decks instead of Anki plus ZDT. I just got in the habit of doing it this way several years ago.)

[ChTTay]

Thanks guys, great advice. Sorry for the long delay... have had a hectic time of late as i've moved to Beijing.

REALMAYO -

I definately see what you mean about losing that "connection". There are so many words I forget about because I don't ever seem to need them. On the other hand, If i make myself use a word... i will start remembering it and using it more. At the moment, I guess I only know about 400 characters and I don't think I'm looking forward to reaching the thousands.

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I'm now at University and have a lot of vocab. I would say around 80 new words a day spread across three classes. At the moment, I have three separate ANKI Decks - one for each class. This just seems cleaner/neater but I'm not sure if it will work out or not in the long term. There is a little bit of overlap but not much - maybe 5 words a week. I also export my "comprehension" class words to SKRITTER as we are expected to know how to write them in this class. For speaking and listening, recognition is okay at the moment.

I have one questions, do you think I can cut down some of this vocab if it seems unlikely to be useful? The only thing I'm thinking of is if they base their exam on some of the texts... that might make "qipao 旗袍“ a bit more useful i guess!

I don't know how I am going to handle all this vocab but ... it seems like every student, every year has to do the same thing so I guess it must be somewhat doable!

Thanks again

[Guest realmayo]

For me, adding 80 new cards to Anki every day would be far too much: there would come a point when I had so many reviews I'd just give up, stop using the deck, and so in the end all the work I'd put in earlier would be wasted.

My advice would be to spend time learning the 80 new words of vocab without using Anki, if indeed you are expected to learn these words. And then after a few days, choose 20 of them to put into Anki as new cards. Doesn't have to be 20, whatever number seems manageable and sustainable in the long run. Pick the ones you think (guess) are the most important. This way, you'll be learning all the words that your teachers want you to learn. And, thanks to Anki, you'll be rock-solid on a portion of them. If you have a period or a holiday where you're not getting given new words to learn, then review some earlier lessons and select some vocab from those that you learned in the past but didn't put into Anki, and add these to Anki as your 20+ new words for the day. Remember: 20 words a day for five days a week is 5000 in a year, which is loads, and doesn't even include words you're learned at some stage but haven't yet added to Anki.

I would suggest you make sure you're not thinking of SRS as some magic bullet that will free you from the grind of having to spend time going over vocabulary lists, learning words and so on -- although for learning how to recognise and how to write individual characters, not words, I found it much more magic-bulletlike. But then, there are some people who disagree and say SRS replaces the whole traditional vocab-learning procedure.

[imron]

The above is very good advice.

[abcdefg]

My advice would be to spend time learning the 80 new words of vocab without using Anki, if indeed you are expected to learn these words.

#5 -- @ realmayo -- I use ZDT for what you are describing as "phase one" above in your excellent post, namely "initial cramming." Then I transfer the "keepers" to Anki to aid in long term retention.

But I also "prune" my Anki and toss out things I know cold. There is absolutely no reason why I still need 你好 and 我们 in my Anki deck at this point in time, unless I just want to be able boast about how many words it contains.

[chaiknees]

There is absolutely no reason why I still need 你好 and 我们 in my Anki deck at this point in time, unless I just want to be able boast about how many words it contains.

Totally agree with that. What I do every few months, I open the card browser of my Anki deck and sort the cards by "Due" or "Interval", then remove the old crap. The effect might be small, but on the other hand it can lead to the 10-reviews-less-per-day a few months later to avoid "overload". It also reduces deck size which makes the synchronization more smooth, especially if you use mobile devices.

But how to be able to keep track of my progress? Before the cleaning actions, I export the deck to a text file and re-import it into Excel, append it to the the data which I exported the last time and so on. Then I can use a pivot table with "Count"-function to count the unique words I know. Similar for the characters.

[ChTTay]

Realmayo - I will have to do what you suggest and pick out the most important words. There are just too many otherwise. In addition to ones in the vocab list, there are ones I don't know in the 课文 and also some occaisional new words in the questions about the text.

For me, It's quite hard to tell which are the most important. There are some obvious clues - the teacher goes over this word in the lesson and gives examples or it is part of the main grammar point of the text. Recently we learned 即使 so I'd put that in there.

All -

How do you learn your characters when there are so many?

I used to have 3 hours of Chinese a week and I would simply re-read the dialogues over and over until I knew the words. I'd mostly concentrate on recognition, then I'd get to practice writing by doing my workbook and skritter. I used integrated chinese.

I can feel myself getting in a bit of a "vocabulary swamp" if I'm not careful.

Really appreciate the advice. I have made a few notes about Tsinghua - application, classes etc - and will try to post it up when I've got a minute!

[ChTTay]

Couldn't see anywhere to delete a post (this post, not main one above) but I answered my own question!