How to quickly memorise HSK 5 and 6 vocabulary

[DanielW]

Having learnt Chinese in kindergarten, I found it easy to skim through HSK. I learnt the vocabulary lists 1-4 in about 3 months through Memrise. Now a large proportion of the words in HSK 5 and 6 are new words. Even though I'm not going for the HSK, I am memorising the HSK vocabulary because I still can't read books well due to my limited vocabulary and prefer to get a standard vocabulary.

I just purchased Pleco yesterday. What is the fastest way to learn the rest of the vocabulary through the flashcard system? Should I use spaced repetition? Right now I am using spaced repetition multiple choice as it is less taxing on my brain. I can spend 5-8 hours every day studying (on term break now)

Thanks!

[耳耳语语]

Hello.
If you study 5 hours a day, I would recommend to diversify your methods with reading/listening the vocabulary in context.

Flashcards is helpfulto "limit forgetness", "maintaining", but not for learning words or for mastering connotations.

It may work briefly as a brute-force learning hammer, but then the faster you learn the faster you forget...

 

Maybe  the best compromise between speed and  long term would be to study full sentences, like the examples given with each new word in the

Tuttle learner's chinese-English dictionnary (available in Pleco).

[hedwards]

I'm not surprised.

 

One of the problems with memorizing characters is that the collocation can and does change the meaning of a lot of them. So, you can memorize the list of possible meanings, but when you go to read a sentence you have to figure out which combinations of characters make up a word and which of the particular meanings is relevant to the sentence. Needless to say that's a lot harder than just rattling off the possible meanings for the character or characters.

 

I assume that when you say you can't read books that you're talking about adult books rather than children's books or graded readers, because at your level, you shouldn't have too much trouble with 400 or probably 1000 word books. And the experience you get from those will allow you to read books with more words as you'll be more able to identify how the sentences are actually laid out and you'll have a much larger vocabulary of grammatical structures to assist.

 

I personally use Anki for my SRS needs, but if you don't need to access the vocab on your computer, then Pleco is probably a good choice. But, the point is mainly not to waste time testing things you know. As far as the actual memorization goes, I use mnemonics for that. I'll write the character out once, stroke by stroke, but I don't bother learning it all at once. I'll learn the reading and the meaning and then once I've got the word in my head, I'll learn the character.

 

If I'm finding that I'm having a harder time than usual, I'll start writing the character, pinyin and reading for the ones I get wrong. I find this usually makes it stick, but I prefer not to do that as it's dangerously close to rote memorization.

 

And, less taxing is bad. You'll make more progress without the multiple choice and just spend a bit less time on the vocabulary each day. Spend more time listening and reading. And definitely do at least some writing and speaking. Ideally, you want to be spending about the same amount of time on all those tasks. In practice though, when you're speaking, you're usually having to listen.

[renzhe]

Hedwards, are you talking about characters or words? The OP is clearly talking about memorising words (词) from the HSK lists, so collocation is not the issue.

I'd say that 5 hours a day of flashcarding will fry your brain. Keep it to 30 minutes per day, maximum 1 hour, and try to spread it around. Use the rest to read anything you can get your hands on, comics are a good thing, but there are easier books that you should try too. If you're spending 8 hours per day, make them fun.

[hedwards]

@renzhe, he also said that he can't read books. Memorizing characters is a necessary component of the test, but so are the reading and writing components and memorizing characters doesn't solve the problem of reading or writing.

 

Anyways, it's foolhardy, IMHO, to try and memorize the long list of definitions for characters via flash cards. If a word has 8 different definitions, how many of them do you need to know in order to say you got it right? Is it OK if your definition paraphrases the official answer or does it have to be precise? How many times do you get to get it wrong before you decide to relearn it from scratch?

 

The point is that it's much, much easier to learn one or two definitions for the character and reading that you can then attach other meanings to than it is to memorize a laundry list of meanings that aren't necessarily related in a way that's obvious to non-natives.

 

But yeah, 8 hours isn't necessarily unreasonably long to spend on Chinese, but you're correct that spending more than about an hour on it is unlikely to yield much in the way of results.

[Silent]

 

What is the fastest way to learn the rest of the vocabulary through the flashcard system?

 

I'ld say keep your expectations low.

 

You write it took you 3 months to learn 1-4, that's only a quarter of the total hsk vocabulary. Add to it that you already knew a fair share of the 1-4 vocabulary and the rest is mostly new. That means you're looking at an effort of a year at best, most likely several years. A term break of a few weeks won't make a big dent in that effort.

 

I guess the best approach would be to keep the amount of flash carding limited. Consistently have several 5-10 minute sessions a day with maybe 30 minutes a day total, would probably be most effective. Ramping up flashcarding time if you have temporarily more time is quite useless as it would decrease effectiveness and increase review times later when the available time is less again. Better spend your extra time reading. It reinforces the vocabulary you have learned, gives anchors to better memorize vocabulary and improves understanding the nuances through context.

[renzhe]

memorizing characters doesn't solve the problem of reading or writing.

We talking about memorising words, not characters: "Now a large proportion of the words in HSK 5 and 6 are new words." Characters are only a part of this.

I agree that memorising long lists of definitions is not useful. I used to learn the most common one, and then use reading to acquire nuance and further meanings. For both characters and words.

But yeah, 8 hours isn't necessarily unreasonably long to spend on Chinese

No, of course not. It's too long to spend on flashcards, that was my point. I can easily spend more than 8 hours on Chinese, if most of it is reading, watching series, or conversation.

The effectiveness of flashcards drops sharply after 30 minutes, in my experience.

[DanielW]

Sorry guys, I was out. Thanks for all the suggestions, advice and information!

 

I think a bit more background is necessary. (Skip to the curly brackets {} if it's too long) I can read simple children's books with gaps in it (many names of animals, etc are not in the HSK lists). When I said I learnt 1-4 in 3 months, I actually covered 5 too with Memrise. It's just that given Memrise does not provide context, I want to re-learn HSK 5. I actually find flashcarding fun! Books I can't read are like 查理失踪历. I understand what's going on (about 30 percent) but I just skim past many words because I don't understand them. Thus, I guess a lot of the words (semi-accurately). Overall, I can get the gist of the story but not the details. I understand Harry Potter a lot (since I have read it before) but I understand only about 70 percent of the words (according to Chinese Text Analyser). Apparently, I understand only 10 percent of unique phrases/characters. I watched 北京爱情故事 and I understand about 50 percent of the words when not slowed down (less if I don't see the subtitles). 

Actually, I went through HSK 1-4 to systemise my understanding of Chinese. I didn't know which characters the words I was speaking corresponded to and learning HSK 1-4 allowed me to.

 

{Skip to here for my question}

I understand flashcarding does not work very well for long hours of work. What about making it like Memrise? (Which was effective for me). I would just make the increase in score in Pleco very low and force it to test me often. I would also make it show me example sentences for context.

 

P. S. Also, I'll finish all the 10 children's books I have (but I think I might run through them in 3-4 days). I live in a Third-World country that has its own Chinese material which isn't really standard. (I think you can guess the country). Searching for suitable material is rather hard as most of the material I can buy here uses traditional characters (which I can't read) or are from my own country (which are loaded with non-idiomatic expressions). I can have them shipped from elsewhere but that would cost a bomb.

Edited May 24, 2014 at 02:37 PM by DanielW

[hedwards]

Daniel, if you can find ebooks, I tend to run mine through imron's Chinese Text Analyzer and review as much of the vocab ahead of time as possible. I'd take its estimations of ability with a grain of salt as the segmenter is under active development and may or may not be identifying all the words correctly.

 

Does Pleco not offer sentences? I haven't looked too closely at the flashcard part of Pleco, I use Anki for my SRS needs. Anki definitely can give you cloze style sentences, require you to type in answers as well as test in both directions. Anki 2.x was unfortunately a step backwards for Chinese.

 

Memrise is neither right nor wrong as a part of your tool kit. If it works for you, then I'd use it, but I'd strongly suggest that you move towards using a course that requires you to type in answers rather than just selecting an answer.

 

@renzhe, I think something is being miscommunicated here. I'm not really sure what precisely we're disagreeing about. So, I'm not really sure how to respond in a way that's meaningful and hopefully helpful to the OP.

[Silent]

 

Daniel, if you can find ebooks, I tend to run mine through imron's Chinese Text Analyzer and review as much of the vocab ahead of time as possible.

I use a comparable method however I don't learn them ahead of time but during reading. I think that gives best synergy between reading (with a pop-up dictionary) and flashcarding. For more frequent vocabulary that is specific to the books subject you run the risk that the spacing in the deck ends up at the large end. If you stick to the hsk vocabulary and keep reading other books this probably is only a minor issue. If you blindly take the high frequency vocabulary of a text you may run into 'trouble' due to names and subject/writer/book specific vocabulary that can make rare vocabulary high frequency. So some kind of filtering is prudent, a hsk filter may be a good choice.

[DanielW]

 

 

Daniel, if you can find ebooks, I tend to run mine through imron's Chinese Text Analyzer and review as much of the vocab ahead of time as possible. I'd take its estimations of ability with a grain of salt as the segmenter is under active development and may or may not be identifying all the words correctly.

Does Pleco not offer sentences?

 

Those are great suggestions! Thank you so much! I'll make some flashcards for sentences.

I think your approach to Chinese Text Analyzer is incredibly clever. It makes a lot of sense to memorise vocabulary that I know will be used in the book I read. I would gain context and strengthen my memories.

[hedwards]

@silent, you don't really need to learn the entire book ahead of time, but if I analyze the text ahead of time, it helps to ensure that I'm not needing to look up more than 5 words per page. Any more than that means that the book is too hard, or that you need to study more before you start.

 

If you're curious about why I read like that, it's based upon the whole language approach. It's extensive reading and the theory behind it is that you pick up on the grammar and word use almost subconsciously. I don't personally buy into it to that extent, grammar and vocab study are still necessary; but I find that I've been a lot more motivated to learn my characters and vocabulary when I'm using it to actually read. Otherwise, the only purpose in learning the characters is so that I can keep the different words with the same pronunciation straight.

 

Eventually though, you'll probably find that you're picking up the meaning of words just based upon reading and that you're just looking up words for the purpose of figuring out how they're pronounced.

[Silent]

 

you don't really need to learn the entire book ahead of time, but if I analyze the text ahead of time, it helps to ensure that I'm not needing to look up more than 5 words per page. Any more than that means that the book is too hard, or that you need to study more before you start.

If you read electronicly with a pop-up dictionary looking up words is not really a big issue. I agree the number should be limited but wouldn't put a hard number on it. I think to decide or a book is too hard it's not only the vocabulary to consider. It's a mix of vocabulary, grammar, writing style, subject(familiarity)，predictability and probably many more factors. I've seen sentences I knew only 70% or so of the words and the meaning was clear. I've also seen sentences in which I knew all the words and still had no clue what was meant. As vocabulary can easily and objectively be determined it still is a fair proxy to determine which books to attempt.

 

When you're still at the hsk level vocabulary you're pretty much confined to childish and shallow stories if you're too strict on the amount of unknown vocabulary. Personally I feel that's not too motivating for extensive reading.

[hedwards]

@silent, the point is to learn to read, if you have to look up more than 5 words, even with a pop up dictionary, you're not going to be learning very much. And it's going to take ages to finish anything longer than a few dozen pages. If there's more than 5 words that you can't recognize, then the text is too hard and you'll make better progress with an easier text. It doesn't necessarily mean that every page has to fit within that margin, but if on average you're having to look up more than 5 words, it means that the text is too hard and that you're spending too much effort on identifying the words and not enough on the actual reading.

 

I'm not quite as down on pop up dictionaries as some people are, but they're not a substitute for knowing the vocabulary and reading texts that are at an appropriate level. They just make it easier for you to look up the few words that you don't know and frequently make it easier to add to a list for study.

 

Ultimately, it's your study time, but some of these guidelines exist for a reason. It's challenging enough reading a book in a foreign language and identifying how exactly the words are being used in this context without spending time and energy trying to infer from context what you should have already known before you started reading.

[Silent]

 

@silent, the point is to learn to read, if you have to look up more than 5 words, even with a pop up dictionary, you're not going to be learning very much

I don't know what's the basis for this statement, but I think you're wrong here, but maybe it has to do with personal factors or the definition of a page. I just checked a few pages from different books and end up with somewhere between 300 and 700 words per page. When I see recommendations for extensive reading they tend to recommend a comprehension rate of about 98%. For the sample pages this would mean 6 to 14 words per page. In my experience this 98% is a reasonable average. With a simple subject and simple grammar the comprehension rate may very well be a little less. The first book I read  I had less then 90% comprehension rate when I started out and that went unexpectedly smooth thanks to fairly simple language and a fair bit of repetition. I admit this has been an extreme case, but it illustrates nicely that even that 98% is not that hard a limit. At the same time I've read (non Chinese) texts with well over 99% comprehension rate where I still had a very hard time figuring out what was meant. There are many more factors in play then just vocabulary.

[mihao]

I actually think that if you know HSK1-4 vocabulary, it's better now to use a spaced repetition program (I think Pleco would be the best, as it has both a SRS and excellent dictionaries) to learn the characters that appear in HSK5 and 6. In my opinion, characters need to be rote memorised anyway, and SRS is best for this. And the number of new characters in HSK5-6 is not so large. On the other hand, I think it's not worth it to memorise all the new HSK5&6 words without context. So when you've covered all the characters, either make an SRS database with example sentences, that use words in context, or use some other way to acquire vocabulary, e.g. by spending much time on reading and looking up unknown words.