How do I increase my vocab? Anki deck suggestions?

[winterpromise31]

Howdy! 

 

I posted here a few months back asking for some advice on getting started. We're adopting a child from Taiwan so I've been learning Mandarin and am having a lot of fun with it. I'm just about to finish up YoyoChinese's beginner course and will start their intermediate course next week. 

 

Does anyone have a favorite Anki deck for learning vocabulary? I feel that my grammar is progressing faster than my vocabulary. Last week I tried to have a conversation with a friend from China and quickly stalled due to lack of vocab. I just finished this deck (https://ankiweb.net/shared/info/2407634550) which includes 500 words and am not sure which deck to download next. The issue is that I need it to include traditional characters, as that's what my daughter uses. Any suggestions on a favorite vocab deck that includes traditional characters? Or is there an easy way to add traditional characters to a simplified deck?

 

Thanks for the suggestions! I don't post much but love reading these forums.

 

Cassandra

[Silent]

I'ld say look for some HSK deck, that's a good start. Further you can just add the words you encounter and add them to the deck, a bit more work, but the benefit is you learn words you actually use.

[Demonic_Duck]

Make your own deck, add the words you encounter. If you're not encountering enough words, find some appropriate material first (a good textbook, graded readers, TV shows, music you're listening to etc.) If you're learning words divorced from context, it's difficult to make them stick, and even more difficult to get an accurate feel for how they're actually used.

 

For this purpose, I'd recommend the Pleco app over Anki, as flashcard creation is much quicker from a dictionary entry (unless you find the act of creating the flashcards itself to be particularly valuable, which some people do).

[Johnny20270]

Making your own deck is the best way forward in my view. Anki states that too. I add words in when I come across them, from Chinesepod, pimsleur, Rossetta Stone, Grammar book etc. My grammar book has 1600 words so more than enough for now. When I add the word into my decks I also include (copy and paste) 1 or 2 example sentences This way you are not just seeing a word in isolation. Further, some words have several meanings so its useful to have a corresponding sentence.

 

As Demonic_Duck says, its 

 

If you're learning words divorced from context, it's difficult to make them stick, and even more difficult to get an accurate feel for how they're actually used.

 

I agree with that but I do think its not totally useless. I review the HSK decks as I intend to do the HSK exams at some point but I find that I am just parroting off a word without any real understanding of its usage. However, I have found that I do come across these words eventually as my learning continues. My HSK deck is just a subset of my overall 'words' deck and I only have a tag referring to HSK

 

I add all my words to ANKI and import to spreadsheet as its just what I started with but I can see the benefit of Pleco too. Personally I prefer to use a PC than a phone for editing decks hence ANKI

 

As for traditional characters, well just have that as a field in ANKI, (if U use it). For example when I come across a new word such as dog, I go to http://www.mdbg.net/chindict/chindict.php?page=worddict&wdrst=0&wdqb=dog

 

and copy the entry into a spreadsheet, you can select traditional characters 

[winterpromise31]

Hi guys,

 

Thanks for the advice. I do learn better in context but I don't find the vocab decks useless. I was surprised to actually come across a good portion of the vocab deck in my Chinese class, so they reinforced each other well. It made the grammar easier because I found I already knew most of the vocab from the lesson. 

 

I'm not yet reading any material in Chinese. Maybe it's time to start doing that. So far I've been adding to my own deck from my Chinese class but no where else. That's where I get my sentences as well. I've been starting to wonder if it's time to start reading native materials. When I was working on Japanese, I couldn't find materials at my level and would get frustrated and completely overwhelmed.

 

Thanks!
Cassandra

[Johnny20270]

Chinese breeze books are good place to start reading native chinese in my view cassandra

[Demonic_Duck]

To me, "native Chinese" implies "Chinese written by and for natives" (whether that's 3-year-old kids just about to start kindergarten, or folks with doctoral degrees reading up on the latest research on their highly specialised and technical area of expertise). The beauty of Chinese Breeze and other graded readers is that they're written by natives, but not for natives.

 

To be honest though, I can't really offer much of a personal recommendation. The only Chinese Breeze book I ever read all the way through was 《我可以请你跳舞吗？》, and I didn't find it all that much fun to read. I'm not sure I should blame that on the storytelling skills of the author, more likely it's simply the constraints imposed by the medium. With that said, I'm still very much sold on the idea of graded readers, though they don't necessarily have to be fiction. The best thing is to find something that would be completely fascinating to you in your native language, and then you'll find it's only slightly less fascinating when it's written predominantly using only the n hundred most common words of a foreign language.

[Silent]

I've the impression there's a bit of a misconception about pre-configured vocabulary decks and learning in context. To me they are not mutually exclusive. I started out with several decks that over time have been merged to a single large deck with close to 40000 cards (some duplicates). At first I did study lists, started with HSK1, then HSK2 etc.

 

Nowadays I pretty much use it as a dictionary, look up the vocabulary I encounter and want to study, label it as 'prio' and it's added to my queue of vocabulary to learn. I think not that different from the instantaneous addition from looked up words in pleco some people adore. If I encounter words that I want to study and are not in the deck I add them manually with the label 'prio' to add them to my study queue.

 

In principle I agree that context is king in learning vocabulary. Nevertheless I feel sometimes that context is exaggerated. I mean an apple is an apple, context won't make a big difference to the understanding of apple. Oftentimes exactly the same sentences can be made with pear, orange, banana, coconut etc. Context is mainly useful to learn words that are different in L1 and L2. E.g. there's no exact equivalent of 'and' in Chinese, it may be 和， 也， 又， etc. Here context is very useful to learn when to use which translation, to learn the nuances.

[Demonic_Duck]

I think the other problem that I have with learning premade word lists is that they're not optimised to you. It's much more useful to me to learn certain specialised words that are relevant to my interests, than to learn a generic hodgepodge of words that may or may not be relevant to me.

 

That said, I can see the value of this type of word list when cramming for a specific HSK exam, etc.

 

In Pleco I downloaded wordlists for HSKs 1-6 ages ago. I never review them in flashcard sessions, but every time I view a dictionary entry, the modified flashcard icon tells me whether it's in one of those decks, which is handy to know (I can also check which one it's in with relative ease).

[winterpromise31]

I'm going to look into ordering some graded readers to get me started on reading practice.

To me, "native Chinese" implies "Chinese written by and for natives" (whether that's 3-year-old kids just about to start kindergarten, or folks with doctoral degrees reading up on the latest research on their highly specialised and technical area of expertise). 

 

Yes, that's what I meant when I mentioned native Chinese materials. I've read a lot of complaints about materials written for language learners that use very outdated or very formal sentence structure. That's what I am trying to avoid. I ran into that myself on Lang-8 when I wrote a post in Japanese about going to the grocery store. Someone laughed and wanted to know where in the world I got the term for grocery store because no one uses that term anymore. 

 

I like the idea of reading in context what I would read in English. But I don't think I'm anywhere near ready for that. I'm a housewife, so I don't read for work. In English, I read parenting books, Christian fiction, biographies, some modern mainstream fiction, Christian devotionals, cookbooks, travel memoirs, etc. I don't read the news in English. I watch very little television in English (mostly Korean shows with a smattering of Taiwanese and Japanese). I'm a visual learner and have a really hard time focusing while listening to podcasts. So I'm not quite sure where to go from here. I did follow a link trail here on the forums and ended up at a graded reader for Sherlock Holmes. That would be interesting as I did watch all the BBC episodes. ;)

[Silent]

 

In Pleco I downloaded wordlists for HSKs 1-6 ages ago. I never review them in flashcard sessions, but every time I view a dictionary entry, the modified flashcard icon tells me whether it's in one of those decks, which is handy to know (I can also check which one it's in with relative ease).

Could you elaborate on this? What's the use of knowing a certain word is in a deck you've chosen not to review? I could understand that occurrence of vocabulary in a certain list is considered a recommendation. E.g. I tend to make unknown vocabulary lists of reading material I intend to read. Sometimes it's hard to choose what to learn as many words have the same or comparable number of occurrences. In the past I gave preference to lower level HSK vocabulary. Nowadays the HSK vocabulary is still considered, other factors such as personal judgement and source have become important too.

[Demonic_Duck]

Could you elaborate on this? What's the use of knowing a certain word is in a deck you've chosen not to review?

Basically, it gives me an indication that the word I just learnt from X source is reasonably common, as it's (say) an HSK5 word. It's also nice to think to myself, "what I'm learning now will eventually be of use whenever I decide to sit an HSK exam".

 

Also, if I notice there are two words that mean the same thing, all else being equal I'll have a bias towards learning the one that's included in HSK vocabulary.

 

On the other hand, there's lots of common vocab that isn't in the HSK, so I don't decide not to add cards simply because they're not HSK.

 

I did follow a link trail here on the forums and ended up at a graded reader for Sherlock Holmes. That would be interesting as I did watch all the BBC episodes. ;)

Sounds like a great starting place. Buy it, read it, post your review here when you're finished!

[Law-West]

My favourite method for building vocab is taking a short text/audio/video, picking out all the new words, and then periodically listening to/reading it again, until I reach 100% comprehension without dictionaries. There's a lot of great posts about this method, so I won't go into too much detail about it. Just pick a topic that is relevant to you and see how much of it you understand, then work towards fully understanding it.

[winterpromise31]

Thanks for all of the advice! I haven't decided exactly what I am going to do next but I do want to dive into a book or something online. I'm trying to finish up my beginner class and should be done today. My reward is that I get to buy myself something new to learn from, whether it be movie or book or something else. We do own a Mandarin version of Beauty and the Best and Cinderella. I should start watching one of those and see how much I can understand. And I do want to get that Sherlock Holmes book at some point.