How should I structure my anki cloze deletions?

[lukey296]

I've decided to start using the sub2srs program to make a ton of sentences, graduating away from pleco's awkward, uncommon and sometimes just incorrect word usages. I'm really excited to get started but I wanted to get some opinions on how is best to arrange anki sentences.

 

My style of making them (the first screenshot) is where you can see the chinese and the english at the ame time and the entire word is one cloze deletion.

 

My friend phil has another style which I also like (screenshot 2) where he doesn't include any english, but only makes one character of a word for each cloze deletion sentence. 

 

I like them both but which do you think is better for actual recall? Is there another style of cloze deletion I could be using?

 

Cheers,

 

Luke

 

P.s. by the way, I've also included a deck of 10,000 hsk 6 sentences done in my style for anyone to check out (1,300 sentences not yet cloze deleted). I've covered pretty much the whole 2,500 vocabulary with them. Phil's Style has only 2,000 or so sentences. Please Check out but be warned, my sentences are from Pleco so a lot don't read that naturally. I'm just using them to get a feel of word usage. Phil used linedict.com sentences which seem a little better.

 

Luke's HSK 6 sentences.txt

Phil's HSK 6 Sentences.txt

[xiaokaka]

I can't comment on which works best, since I haven't used cloze deletion test myself yet—but I've been thinking about it for some time, and wondering how to best do it myself—so this seems very helpful. Thank you!

Ps. Does anyone know of a similar deck for the HSK5 words?

[ChTTay]

You say "pleco's ...incorrect word usage" but doesn't this depend on the dictionary your are using? Did you buy a decent one or just using the ones free with Pleco?

[Demonic_Duck]

Also, when you say "word usages", do you mean the example sentences in the default Pleco dictionary (PLC)? I've never noticed an example sentence that was incorrect in that dictionary, and seldom see any awkward translations either.

[lukey296]

Yeah I have the professional package for pleco and the dictionaries are great in general, just not when wanting to learn natural native Chinese. I base my opinions on what my Chinese friends and teacher have pointed out. Mostly it's just awkward and clunky (unnatural or ‘别扭’) phrases that are the problem, where my friends hear me say these sentences and scrunch up their faces. When I ask if it's wrong they say something like: "technically no, but nobody speaks like that". However, to be fair, I only have two confirmed examples of actual incorrect usages of words. the word 省略 under PLC dictionary shows a second meaning 'understand' and there was a sentence: '他究竟是你的弟弟吗?' where I'm told it should be '毕竟'. 

 

How much of a problem the sentences are depends on your aims in learning Chinese I guess. I'm aiming to be able to speak like a fluent naive speaker, as well as be able to read and write well, so pleco, although still an indispensable tool, doesn't have everything I need. 

 

P.S. ABC dictionary is better and seems to have a lot of slang/natural words and phrases that others don't, which is great when checking words while watching TV. 

[roddy]

That definition of 省略 might be clearer, but it's hardly wrong. Understood: implied but not stated, left unexpressed. Note it's tagged as 'grammar', so you expect it to be a bit of a specialised usage. I can't see your 他究竟是你的弟弟吗? anywhere, whereabouts is it?

[xiaokaka]

I found this sentence under 究竟 in PLC:

他究竟是你弟弟。

Tā jiūjìng shì nǐ dìdi.

Anyway he is your younger brother.

It might be the one he meant.

[mikelove]

FWIW, things get considerably better in the new edition of PLC we're almost ready to release - based on the third edition of 《汉英词典》, from 2010, instead of the 2nd edition from 1995 as the current PLC is. Along with adding parts of speech, it cleans up a lot of mistakes and old usages, has far fewer Communist era sentences (though we're considering offering a 同志版 that restores them), and 省略 now just has the one definition "leave out; omit (on purpose)". That 究竟 sentence is still there, but now with an 啊 tacked on the end, so somebody seems to have reviewed it and decided it was still worth leaving in. We're also doing some work on our own to add new / better examples on top of the ones in the print edition, though the fruits of that will probably show up a bit later.

At the same time, though, we are kind of in the business of selling add-on dictionaries, so if PLC was so good as to eliminate any benefit from a paid add-on dictionary that would not necessarily be the best thing for us :-)

[abcdefg]

P.S. ABC dictionary is better and seems to have a lot of slang/natural words and phrases that others don't, which is great when checking words while watching TV.

 

Could you elucidate, please? What is the ABC dictionary and where can it be found? I would be interested in trying it. Thanks.

[imron]

What is the ABC dictionary and where can it be found?

It's available as a Pleco addon.

[xiaokaka]

And it is the dictionary used by Wenlin (wenlin.org), and there also exist multiple printed versions (abridged and non-abridged).

[lukey296]

I'm glad to hear pleco is improving their sentences, looking forward to the update. Thanks for clearing up a few things guys.

 

Would anyone be able to answer my original question about the Anki decks though? I'd really like to get some opinions on it.

 

Thanks,

 

Luke

[tysond]

Hi lukey296, I will be happy to give my opinions on Anki cloze sentences, because it's my focus for revision.

 

I base my usage of Anki Clozes on khatzumoto's "All Japanese All the Time" blog and his described "MCD" technique.  

MCD means Massive/Micro Cloze Deletion - that's all.

 

The purpose of the cloze is to test whether you can produce a response given some context.  

The context is there to help you understand what you need to produce.  The context can be massive or micro depending on what you find useful/fun/necessary.

 

I mostly use English contexts where convenient (I use subs2srs a lot so I have lots of sentences), and test on single characters at a time (although I need to also get the pronunciation right).  

I tried multiple characters (e.g. words) and found it not very suitable for writing practice (but probably fine, and more efficient for just speaking).

 

Having 100% Chinese on the front of the card is even better, although I think it's a bit better when you are more advanced.  A wall of Chinese can make it hard to get familiar with the entire sentence/paragraph.  If it's a topic you are familiar with, and content you understand pretty well, and there's just a few words you need to learn it's OK.  When more advanced of course this gets more and more possible as you can quickly ready everything else and guess the missing word. 

 

What I find is that after a while, I barely even read the English (because I kind of memorize the sentence anyway).  I am too busy scanning the Chinese sentence to see what's missing, and then fill it in.  

 

A few other styles I use:

• Chinese text from Wikipedia, with English text from Wikipedia below (they aren't a perfect translation or anything, but usually cover similar information)
• Chinese - Chinese dictionary definition for a word you already know, cloze the definition parts that are interesting  e.g. 拉拉队 - 名 - 举行竞技比赛时，为参赛者呐喊助威的有组织的观众队伍。

Some other things I now do:

• When making cards for a new 2 character word - make 2 cards with different sentences.  Cloze the first character on one card, the second character on the other card.  This gives you two examples for the price of one (assuming you have lots of sentences to easily draw upon).
• When making cards for completely new characters, find 2 different words (high frequency) and make cards for them.  Combined with the rule above this means you might make a bunch of cards to learn 1 new word, but it can be worthwhile to strengthen the knowledge.  
• Annotate English with more helpful translations
• Try to only add new cards when you understand the word.  Super fresh vocabulary is much more expensive, in terms of time, to learn.  Stuff that keeps coming up and you say "oh yeah I've seen this before" is much more economical to memorize.  SRS is a revision technique more than a learning one.
• Don't be afraid to nuke the deck (or put it into backup) and focus on newer stuff for a while.  Other stuff will come back up if it is important.

Hope this is helpful.  There's really no right or wrong, it's more important that it's fun, interesting content, and that you can produce the word/character without too much time spent.

[lukey296]

Thanks tysond, that's really helpful. I'll get on that now.

[tysond]

Oh, another tip:

 

Sometimes I write out the entire sentence, or a few key words, apart from the cloze.  

 

This is because I actually rarely have need to write, so copying out text can help solidify some *super* common characters.  

 

One of the drawbacks of SRS is that is has no concept of frequency.   Every fact is just as important as every other one.

So you are spending as much time/effort trying to memorize 嗡 as 的.  

 

But that's a bit crazy, because if you forget how to write super common characters, it's a big issue.

For listening and speaking this is not such a big deal because those characters will come up in when you use the skill.  

But for writing.... harder.