Where should I go from here?

[Powers of Ten]

I went through the full Pimsleur program and used Anki to memorize all of the characters (traditional and simplified) and compound words from that program, plus many other words. My traditional Anki deck is at a little over 1,500 words. My reading/typing ability far surpasses my speaking/listening ability at this point, but neither is particularly good.

 

I have some ideas, but I'd appreciate any advice on what I should do next.

[tysond]

Good progress...

 

The answer kind of depends on where you want to focus, but I would suggest one or more of the following approaches:

 

1. Learning sentences.  Grab lots of sentences involving words you have studied and topics you are interested in.  Study and understand first, then put into SRS.  Cloze the interesting words.  Zhongwen Red/Green/Blue are probably good sources at this stage.  There is also a site with 3800 Chinese sentences that are very basic but cover many everyday topics.  What I do is put chinese + english on the front and then guess the missing (clozed) words/characters.  If you want to write you can write them, otherwise just pronounce them correctly is OK.

2. Pronunciation - Shadowing.  Improve your pronunciation by using Audacity to repeat and copy native speakers.  Mimic them.  Record your voice.  Look for differences and adjust.   Slow Chinese is a good source.

3. Writing.  Skritter was quite useful to me to learn to write lots of characters.  How far you go with this depends on your goals.  I used Heisig's book to learn 3000 most common characters.

4. Listening: Watch TV and Movies in Chinese.  Easiest to start with Pixar films dubbed in Chinese, then action films dubbed in Chinese.  Use films you already know (Toy Story, Batman, Avengers) and that you enjoy if possible.  Also if you like music listen to lots of Mandarin songs esp if they include lyrics e.g. KTV videos or Baidu music has lyrics for most songs. 

5. Reading: Buy a lot of comic books (doraemon is a good starting one) and graded readers (I use Chinese Breeze).  Put beside the bed.  Read a page or a chapter every night.  Read out loud and get corrections if you can.

 

A textbook might be useful to guide your studies too.  Others may be able to recommend - I mostly use the above.

 

Learning traditional + simplified at the same time is maybe confusing.  I only explicitly study simplified and let traditional come naturally.  Possibly easier to pick one and focus on it, then the other can be picked up when required.

[Powers of Ten]

Thank you for the detailed reply and great suggestions.

 

Regarding traditional + simplified, I often travel to China and Taiwan so I really want to learn both. I recognize the corresponding radicals now, so my daily process is to slog through the traditional deck and then breeze through the simplified.

[renzhe]

You are approaching a point where it becomes increasingly difficult to progress using dry methods, but increasingly possible to do interesting stuff with native materials.

By all means continue flashcarding until you pass 2000 characters and about 5000 words*, but try complementing it with something FUN. Like tysond recommended, comics are a good option (though they will be difficult in the beginning), simple TV shows perhaps.

And definitely get a good textbook. There are many good recommendations on this forum. Flashcards + Pimsleur alone will not suffice.

* just random numbers I pulled out of a hat, but probably not too far off from what you need for elementary literacy