Use of flashcards without characters

[li3wei1]

Before I start, let me explain that I am not advocating not learning characters. We've been down that road and had that discussion, and that's not what I'm talking about here.

 

What I'm wondering is if there would be merit to, as part of a well-balanced diet of study methods, a flashcard strategy that de-emphasizes characters. In other words, rather than looking at a word and trying to remember the meaning and pronunciation, or looking at the meaning and trying to remember the character and pronunciation, simply going from pronunciation to meaning, and from meaning to pronunciation. Pronunciation could be pinyin (or whatever) or audio. The character can be on the answer side of the card, but you're not testing yourself on it and it's not there as a clue.

 

This would be accompanied by lots of time listening to recorded material, with the flashcards ideally keyed to the audio content.

 

One possible advantage to this is it uses less brainpower, so you may be able to remember more words. In an immersion environment, you normally pick up many words through hearing them in conversation, and often you can use them comfortably yourself before you finally run into them in print, so you have a huge head start when you finally come to attaching the characters to the pronunciation and meaning. I suspect for the average immersion learner, the pool of words that have been absorbed aurally but not yet visually is huge. This is an attempt to recreate that for the non-immersion student.

 

Obviously there will be a small number of homophones, which would have to be dealt with somehow. On the other hand, there would be a large number of near-homophones, where the only difference is the tones. I know that that's a huge difference, and the difference between 净身 and 精神 is theoretically bigger than the difference between 净身 and 罄身, but I'm still more likely to confuse 净身 and 精神 than 净身 and 罄身, when I hear them or say them. We've had that discussion, too, but my experience is that it's easier to forget a tone than an initial or a final. I think a pronunciation-focused learning regime might help with these near-homophones.

 

Another advantage is that the listening can be done while driving, washing the dishes, walking down the street, whatever.

 

As I said, this would not be the entire learning regime, but part of it. You would still need to be doing something to learn and/or retain the characters. I'm just wondering if, for someone spending 20 hours a week reading and learning characters, it would be worth spending say 4 hours doing listening/pronunciation instead of reading/writing. Whether the advantage of learning faster (more words) would outweigh the advantage of learning less (since you're not learning the characters).

[Guest realmayo]

This is one of the things I find really frustrating about Chinese, and which I think makes Chinese particularly difficult. If I know the characters 分 and 缘, and see (or test myself on) the word 缘分, knowing the meaning of 缘 gives me a massive reminder about what this word means. But seeing it written doesn't really help much for if I hear yuánfèn spoken out loud.

 

Quite a few years ago I started making an SRS deck which gave me the audio and required me to know the English meaning. I never went far with it though, I ended up deciding that Listening Comprehension books that were slightly below my level were the better option.

 

These days I reckon I can see some value in flashcarding via pronunciation, but only for brand new words and only for maybe one week, to help force the pronunciation into my head. I wouldn't have a long-term audio deck the same way that I would for characters or (written) words. A SRS deck is basically a magic bullet for memorising characters, and is pretty useful for memorising written vocab too. But I'm not sure it's that helpful for listening.

 

One alternative could be to excerpt 2-3 minutes of audio from textbook 课文s, or Chinesepod podcasts, or other audio sources which you've gone through and understood and mined for vocabulary. It would have to be fairly easy to understand and not too full of new words. Set up some primitive SRS: maybe listen to every chunk once a week for a few weeks, then push it out to every two weeks, etc.

[Yorin]

My flashcard strategy is to use two types of flashcards:

 

A) meaning -> pronunciation (and:  pronounciation -> meaning)

 

B) characters -> pronounciation (and: pronounciation -> characters)

 

A) obviously helps with listening comprehension and speaking, B) helps with reading comprehension and writing. Once I've studied both types of flashcards, my brain usually has no problems connecting characters to meaning. (Although of course I need to take some care to keep different words with identical pronounciation apart.)

 

I believe this method helps my speaking abilities and listening comprehension a lot, as it trains me to "think in Chinese" even when dealing with characters (meaning: when I read a Chinese text, my brain is trained to recall the sound as a natural part of my comprehension process, the same goes for writing).

[Lu]

I think it makes sense mainly (only) for learning English (or whatever) to Chinese, that's where it really saves you time not to learn characters and you can expand you vocabulary faster. And if you come across the word in writing somewhere, the chance that you'll figure it out when you already know its pronunciation and meaning are greater.

But for learning the meaning of Chinese words (so Chinese to English/other language), imo it doesn't make sense not to learn the character. Once you have a number under your belt, it actually makes learning easier because you have a hint on pronunciation and how it relates to other words.

[roddy]

Pronunciation could be pinyin (or whatever) or audio.

I'd have a strong preference for using the audio - in fact I might say that's the only way you should do that. Reading pinyin is something you'll next to never have to do in real life, so I can't see why you'd need to do it in practice.

 

And even then, hearing a word in isolation is so different from hearing it in speech, maybe your time would be better spent doing extra listening practice. Apart maybe from right at the start as you're learning to distinguish tones and zh/ch, etc. 

 

'Course, then you could argue most flashcard work should be replaced with reading practice. But I think Imron's already written a song about that. 

[耳耳语语]

Since 2 months I only used Audio entries on flashcards, it really helped me (aka forced me to) pay more attention to  tones.

 

I think each flashcard system helps focusing on one weakpoint at a time, even if the answer card has to be complete.

Here is what I progressively tried with the HSK words lists :

A/ Character->meaning [for me it's the easier step] and the card answer also has pinyin

For any reason, I really can't pass directly to Character->meaning and audio with the right tone, so i pass to :

B/ Audio->meaning [i put the chinese dictionnary entry as a first answer, just to give me a clue which generally works, but I evaluate myself only on the meaning]

C/ Then only I finaly pass to Audio->meaning and character

 

I didn't use any Meaning->audio/character method ; but at a more advanced stage I intend to pass to

Chinese dictionnary definition -> audio and character

Right now i'm adding whole sentences from my HSK textbook to my cards so I can :

Sentences translated in french -> remember and say out loud whole sentences in chinese with the right tones.

 

And of course full texts and podcasts should keep me busy more time than flashcards.

[Elizabeth_rb]

I'd have a strong preference for using the audio - in fact I might say that's the only way you should do that. Reading pinyin is something you'll next to never have to do in real life, so I can't see why you'd need to do it in practice.

 

I completely understand the reasoning behind this.  话说回来 (having said that), as a visual learner, I find I can only remember something really well if I see it written down.  I actually need to see the pinyin (or known character(s)) for something in order to remember it.

[roddy]

I agree, I'd just have it on the other side of the card from the character or meaning...

[Elizabeth_rb]

There's a fortune for the person who invents the 3-sided flashcard - a side each for meaning, pinyin and character(s)!!