flashcards - characters or words?

[sangajtam]

http://www.zein.se/patrick/3000char.html

Is this good place to start?

Beginning from october 2013, to today i have learned first 300 characters, but this are only single characters, not words, i still could not construct any word.

For example i know what 現 mean and i know what 在 means, but i would never know that 現在 means "now".

Shouldnt i learn words, not characters?

Should i continue with those 3000 words or switch to chinesepod exported flashcards?

[Guest realmayo]

Are you using a textbook and/or a teacher too?

[Demonic_Duck]

My own opinions, but I think they're fairly standard and uncontroversial among the Chinese learning community, at least around here.

 

1. Concentrate on words (or short phrases, chengyu, simple structures) as the basic unit. You can add a few individual characters where you feel it's appropriate, but that should be the exception rather than the norm (for example, when you notice that you keep seeing a certain character in compound words and you think knowing its individual meaning would be helpful to aid in remembering those words). Some people even prefer to use sentences as the basic unit, although I rarely go that far myself. Including sample sentences in the "definition" part of the flashcard text can be useful, though.
2. Don't use flashcards to learn, use them to retain. Add your own flashcards as you learn (if you're lazy like me, use Pleco and you can add cards from dictionary entries at the touch of a button). Don't use a pre-made deck which will introduce you to unfamiliar words out of context. Add words as you come across them within context instead. This could be in your lesson, in your textbook, in a conversation, in a magazine, in that TV show you're watching or that song you're hooked on, even on a street sign.
3. Don't rely on the flashcards too much - again, they're for retention, not learning. Also, drilling obsessively quickly becomes boring.

That's about it, hope it helps.

[陆咔思]

Even if many people recommend it, I wouldn't really go for using flashcards with complete words (much less sentences). Once you get to an intermediate or advanced stage you will end up with many thousands, even tens of tousands of flashcards in your deck - it gets quite unmanageable, vast anmounts of reviews tend to pile up.

 

If you listen and read a lot you will encounter the same words again and again anyway, you will retain them even without flashcards. For example, if you know the characters現 and 在, I think if you encounter the word 現在 while reading, learning and retaining it should be fairly easy. 

 

Characters are much more difficult to learn than words, especially for beginners, and their number is much more managable than the number of words - so I think using flashcards for them is a good idea, especially as a beginner. Just don't focus on them too much -  if you never encounter a character while reading, that probably means it's above your level for now, so don't bother learning it. And focus much more on learning the pinyin of the characters than their meaning - the pinyin is what you really need to read, and link what you read to words you may have alredy learned via listening. For most characters with multiple pronunciations, it will be enough to learn the most common one for now - alternate pronunciations are often very rare.

 

The best way for making sure you retain the characters you already learned, and make sure you can actually use them in the real world, is in my opinion reading - it makes you review lots of characters very quickly, and is way more fun than flashcards. If you want to start reading characters as soon as possible, in an easy way, with pinyin where you need it, I would recommend you try my free website http://chinesereaderrevolution.com.

[sangajtam]

I am not using any book or teacher.

Started pimsleur, but it was too slow.

 

Thanks Duck.

So this table is not true?

http://www.zein.se/patrick/3000en.html

i started this because i thought that at 300 remebered i will achieve "64% understanding".

So i thought 20 per day, 3000 in 150 days, + some grammar book and i thought it will be enough to read.

[renzhe]

i started this because i thought that at 300 remebered i will achieve "64% understanding".

Total rubbish.

What it means that you will recognise 64% of characters. You won't understand diddly squat.

Like any other language, Chinese has a vocabulary consisting of words. You need several thousand of these for even the most basic understanding. You need to acquire vocabulary, one way or another.

How you structure your flashcards is a different question. I've found both characters and words useful but there is more than one path to the summit.

[li3wei1]

I use one stack for characters, one for words. Do both, every day. Once you know a character or word pretty firmly, throw it out.

[imron]

i started this because i thought that at 300 remebered i will achieve "64% understanding".

The thing to realise is that 64% is basically nothing.  Take for example your above statement, and remove certain words so that only approximately 64% remain.  What you are left with is:

 

I ***** this because I ***** that at 300 ***** I will ***** 64% *****

 

That is what being able to read 64% of words will give you - except in Chinese it's even worse because of the way characters and words are formed and at that level of vocabulary you'll not be able to tell which characters are part of which words.

 

To be able to read anything meaningful (books, newspapers etc), you'll need comprehension in the high 90%s  (98% is a common figure if you don't want to be relying on a dictionary).  For that, you'll probably need around 2,000-3,000 characters and maybe 10,000 words.

 

Anyway, my personal preference is to learn words, but to make a mental note of the meaning of the individual characters when I'm learning them.  I also generally agree with the above statements about learning things from context, rather than from word lists.

[sangajtam]

Ok, thanks all.

I had recently bought pleco bundle pro, so i would like to use it.

I also have some materials, books in chinese, and audio for them.

So i will open those books in epub, copy into reader in pleco, listen to audio and learn this way.

[Guest realmayo]

Sangajtam, are you a beginner? If so, the usual advice here is that you'll learn faster if you have a good textbook. But if you're very good or very experienced at learning languages then your method should be fine.

Because Chinese has characters, students need to memorise those characters, and lots of people like using flashcards to do that. But don't think that this means Chinese is easier to learn than other languages: it is not true that you only have to memorise characters (or words) and then you'll know Chinese. In fact, you have to do all the normal things for learning any language (grammar, usage, vocab, pronunciation, listening) PLUS you have to memorise the characters too.