Using Anki to learn characters

[Mr John]

Hi all,

 

I apologise if this has already been covered. I had a look before posting, but I wasn't able to find anything conclusive.

 

Very quickly, a little background:

 

I lived in China for almost two years. While there, I had lessons twice a week, one and a half hours per class (with a student) for one year. By the time I left China, we were about a third of the way through NPCR3. Unfortunately, I made the mistake of avoiding learning characers for the majority of that time.

 

Now, I'm trying to address this problem. To this end, I have booked in to take the HSK 3 test in July. I would estimate that at present my reading is somewhere between HSK2 and HSK3 level - or approximately 450 words. However, I'm occasionaly tripped up by what would be considered fairly basic characters.

 

Now, to my point...

 

I know there are Anki lists available for various HSK levels. However, I have read many times that Anki should be used to review, not to learn new material. Based on your experiences, is it practical to use Anki lists to learn the necessary vocabulary for the HSK tests? Or should I just work my way through a HSK list the old fashioned way, writing the characters out by hand until I remember them and adding them to Anki as I go?

 

Finally, if it is possible to use Anki lists to prepare for the HSK, should I stick with the HSK3 list or set my sights higher and go with the HSK4 list? Also, as my character recognition is patchy, the list would need to contain all the words from HSK1 to whatever level I end up choosing.

 

Sorry for all the beating around the bush! Any help is always greatly appreciated.

 

Regards,

John 

[Guest realmayo]

I have read many times that Anki should be used to review, not to learn new material

 

I think this is true as a general rule for vocab but I don't see any problem with setting up an Anki deck for learning how to write individual characers, that's something I did years ago and it worked very well. I made sure I knew how to break the characters down into their individual components. And I included that information in the 'answer' field, just for reference. I used mnemonics to help me remember (and included them in the answer field too) but they're not for everyone.

[roddy]

I think this is fine if you're learning the characters for stuff you already know as spoken vocab. If you were trying to learn 1,000s of new vocab items from scratch it might be a different matter. 

[li3wei1]

Based on your experiences, is it practical to use Anki lists to learn the necessary vocabulary for the HSK tests? Or should I just work my way through a HSK list the old fashioned way, writing the characters out by hand until I remember them and adding them to Anki as I go?

 

I think you're comparing two versions of the same thing: learning characters out of context. If you're going to do this, you may as well do it with Anki. The advice you refer to, however, that is repeated all over this forum, is that rather than working your way through a list, you should encounter new words in context, i.e. in text, or conversation, and then enter them into Anki. For each word, you then have a sentence, or a story, or an image that it can be associated with. The disadvantage is that you don't necessarily find words that are on your list as fast as you otherwise would, and you may be spending time learning words that aren't on your list. But I don't think the HSK tests adhere slavishly to the published lists anyway, certainly not at the higher levels, and if you're using appropriately graded textbooks, all your vocab will be useful pretty quickly.

 

If your basic stuff is patchy, why not use Anki to sort through HSK 1 and 2, and solidify that vocab, then slowly add the HSK 3 stuff as you encounter it?

[Silent]

 

 

 I have read many times that Anki should be used to review, not to learn new material.

There are different levels of learning. Just adding unseen characters to your studylist is maybe not the smartest thing to do. However the old fashioned way of 'completely' learning the character before adding it to anki is imho also not the most efficient approach.

 

I think the most efficient strategy is to study the character somewhat, add it to anki for review and if it doesn't stick (becomes a leech) spend a bit more time to study the character. Admittedly I tend to do the last step occasionly but fail to do it consistently. So I think I would be beter off to really study the vocabulary.

 

 

 

should I stick with the HSK3 list or set my sights higher and go with the HSK4 list?

I've not taken any HSK tests so for what it's worth... I've understood that the HSK doesn't strictly adhere to the HSK vocabulary so in principle learning more is better. However you should keep your goal in mind. If aiming higher results in less focus on the more important lower level vocabulary aiming high may not be the best strategy. You might just start at the lower level vocabulary and gradually working your way to the higher levels and see where you end up. If you prefer to study related characters clustered this advise would obviously be hard(er) to implement. 

[Mr John]

Thanks everyone for your advice.

 

@realmayo

 

At present I do exactly that. I guess I was just second guessing if it's the best use of my time. It's pretty slow going at present, I usually only manage around five words a day - which, including adding them to anki and review takes at least an hour, usually longer. But it sounds like you think it worked for you, so I'll try my best to keep at it.

 

@roddy

 

My "spoken vocabulary" is substantially higher than my reading ability, so maybe it's worth a shot.

 

@li3wei3

 

At present, whenever I learn new words, I make a sentence. I take your point though. Hopefully I can strike a balance between the contextless and contextualised learning of words. I've found that I'm too reliant on context in the past, and that I often guessed the meaning of a word without paying enough attention to the actual structure of the characters. Hopefully I can address this problem by seeing them out of context as well haha. Your last suggestion is perfect, I'll do just that.

 

@Silent

 

Good idea. I'll try to apply that method as well.

[Lu]

What you need to watch out for is learning things wrong, or half-wrong. Stroke order, nuances of meaning, whatever. You can only put so much context on an Anki card (well, you can put lots of context on it, but that's not practical). So you need to make sure you understand what you're learning. If, say, you encounter the character 以 and you don't know what it does, you should not be putting it into Anki, but instead you should find someone (or a book) to explain to you what it does, how to use it, practice some sentences with it, etc. If you learn 住 means 'to live', you need to know it's 'dwell', not 'be alive'.

That said, as long as you make sure you actually know and understand what you're learning, Anki seems to me like an excellent tool for learning characters.

Edited to add: if you can keep up learning five words a day and have them stick, you're not doing badly at all. You can probably speed things up a bit once you know more characters, but even five words a day adds up. Just keep at it.

[hedwards]

As long as you're intending to learn words out of context for recognition, then it's probably OK. You can add a bit of context by including the sentence and making it a cloze exercise, but Anki doesn't really give you any way of testing that you know how to write it. Except for the first few hundred words to begin a graded reader, it's generally better to learn from context, but early on you may not know enough words to be able to manage that.

 

I suppose, you could always write the character down, then check to see if you got it correct and then mark it based upon that, but it's not built in.

 

Unfortunately, Anki took a huge step backward when they moved to version 2.0 in terms of the Chinese support. I'd recommend using Pleco if at all possible as it does it much, much better.

[Mr John]

@hedwards

 

Generally I have a sentence in English containing the word I'm learning showing first. Then I attempt to write the relevant word by hand and mark the answer accordingly.

 

Also, while we're here... I've been looking for the relevant Anki decks. I noticed the HSK 1 & 2 decks don't have the best rating. If I went for one containing the wordlists from HSK1- 6, is it easy to set it up so I only see HSK1 first, followed by HSK 2 and so on?

[Guest realmayo]

So you need to make sure you understand what you're learning. If, say, you encounter the character 以 and you don't know what it does, you should not be putting it into Anki, but instead you should find someone (or a book) to explain to you what it does, how to use it, practice some sentences with it, etc

 

Respectfully disagree: I don't see a problem with putting 以 into Anki if all you know is:

 

- it's pronounced yi3

- it's the second character in 可以

- what 可以 means

- that 以 looks like it means all kinds of difficult stuff you haven't learned yet

 

But I certainly agree that you shouldn't be learning definitions that are very wrong, as in 住 = 'be alive'

[Silent]

 

 

Also, while we're here... I've been looking for the relevant Anki decks. I noticed the HSK 1 & 2 decks don't have the best rating. If I went for one containing the wordlists from HSK1- 6, is it easy to set it up so I only see HSK1 first, followed by HSK 2 and so on?

Don't know what's available now, but when I downloaded my decks most of them contained labels to indicate the HSK level and use those labels to set what you want to learn. Based on anki 1 which I still use, I would recommend to get a large deck and select what you want to study. If you start out with the smaller decks, E.g. HSK1 and proceed to HSK2 you will end up with two decks or have to merge the decks. Which gives extra work and depending on the decks may introduce duplicates. No big issue, but if you have the choice....

[Lu]

Respectfully disagree: I don't see a problem with putting 以 into Anki if all you know is:

- it's pronounced yǐ

- it's the second character in 可以

- what 可以 means

- that 以 looks like it means all kinds of difficult stuff you haven't learned yet

Fair enough, if you are aware of what you don't know, you can put it in. Although then it would probably be better to learn 可以 instead of just 以. But this was just an example and you get my point, right?

[Shelley]

If you use Pleco you can actually practice and review writing characters (with the correct addons). I know Anki is free but the very reasonable one off payment for Pleco is well worth it as you get more than just flashcards.

 

I would go and have a look a the website and see what you think.  https://www.pleco.com/

 

Of course if your budget can stand it there is the very good Skritter, I like it a lot but as my Chinese studies is my passion and only a hobby I find it hard to justify the cost, I do however try and afford a month here and there. http://www.skritter.com/

 

If you like using paper and pen there is the excellent Hanzi Grids  http://www.hanzigrids.com/

This is also a very reasonable one off cost.

 

I hope you enjoy learning to write, I find it very rewarding.

[Frederik451]

The deck "new hsk word list" ( https://ankiweb.net/shared/decks/chinese ) goes through the levels one by one. Whenever you have added all cards from level one, it will start adding cards from level two, and so on. So you dont have to worry about different levels in different decks.

[ForrestEJ]

This is what works for me... for learning Chinese and other languages as well. Keep in mind that the first time you learn something using Anki, you do have to spend a little time on it thinking about it (write it a number of times, thinking a sentences, etc)... after that it is just reviewing.

 

So, you are reading and find character you want to learn....

 

Have one Anki card that is the character... with the flip side being the pronunciation and meaning and maybe even a sentence. That helps you remember how to read and recall the sound. 

 

Then have another card like this, if you are learning the chinese character for "cat":

 

Front: 

 

她不喜欢X

 

mao1

 

Back:

 

她不喜欢猫

 

(and then pinyin or meaning if you want)

 

 

That is getting you to remember usage and how to write it. I also, for Korean which I am much better at, I do not make the first card and put clusters of 3-4 sentences in Anki to get a overall better feel for the context. For Korean, I just leave the words in instead of placing an "X" as there are no characters, but doing the above seems to be working for Chinese.

[Mr John]

@ Shelley

 

Thanks for the suggestions. I've tried Skritter once before, I found it a frustrating experience but that may have been because I didn't take enough time too become familiar with how to use it properly. I found writing characters using a mouse incredibly painful: I know it's possible to buy additional tech, but I wasn't to keen on forking out even more cash. I like Pleco a lot, but I generally prefer using a computer for reviewing for some reason. Thanks for letting me know though about the options available to me.

 

@ Frederick

 

Cheers dude

 

@ Forest EJ

 

Your method sounds like an improvement on mine, so I'll give it a shot. Thanks.

[Johnny20270]

I have been messing about with Anki for a long time now (and still fiddle about with it)

 

For me, its much better to have all my data in a spread sheet and upload to Anki. That way you can make block changes, edit tags in one go, edit faster etc and importantly do a whole lot of cross reference (using vlookup etc in excel)

 

Down side is that you can't use pictures / sound files but I find that just "all bells and whistles" after a low beginner stage 

 

As for HSK, I downloaded the lot and just suspended the levels I am not studying

[Shelley]

Using skritter with a mouse is an unsatisfactory way of going about it, It is a much better experience using a tablet and they have recently released an android version.

 

Also having a tablet is the best way to use Pleco in my experience.

 

But go with what you are used to by all means. If you ever get the chance to try any of these things on a tablet, I think it would be a good thing to see what you think..

 

Hope it goes well for you.

[renzhe]

I think that some kind of rote memorisation is absolutely necessary for learning Chinese characters, but one thing that you should keep in mind is that the more complicated you make it, the more time you will spend servicing the software instead of learning.

I recommend keeping your Anki decks simple and to reuse available materials (such as pre-made HSK decks) whenever possible. You can easily spend a hundred hours creating, updating, fixing, pondering, re-designing, servicing, and sorting your flashcards, and I feel that that time would be better spent reading several Chinese novels.

There is an inherent danger in over-engineering your flashcards: cloze-style, multiple-choice, complete sentence, multiple meanings and multiple pronunciations. Many people spend more time twiddling with their tools than actually learning. Keep it easy, use whatever is available, do only as much tweaking as is needed, and spend your time with textbooks and (later) native-level materials instead.

[Lu]

You can easily spend a hundred hours creating, updating, fixing, pondering, re-designing, servicing, and sorting your flashcards

Aka the modern-day version of endless shopping for the perfect textbook instead of sitting down with the imperfect one.