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[Guest]

That's a good point - thanks for the comments you two. I'm a bit busy tonight, but I'll try to bookmark the best part of a day a week (minimum) to both finding new material and preparing everything I need to study through for the next week.

[Guest]

[deleted]

[abcdefg]

•  

• Massively upping the number of words I want to learn per week on this thread. Upping from 50-100 to 140-175 (aiming for 20-25 words/day).

 

 

That's a lot of new words each day. Are you sure it's prudent to push so fast in lieu of spending more time to review?

[imron]

This is my thought exactly. Long term you'll get greater benefit from more effort per word rather than more words per day.

High word rates are not sustainable long term and make you prone to burnout.

The definition of *high* will be different for each person based on their available time to study, but if as you noted you're about to have *less* free time, I would caution against increasing raw word count.

[Guest]

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[imron]

I expect a week or two in to it, the rate will still be sustainable.

 

What will happen in a month or two however is that one day, it'll be 10.00pm at night and for a combination of reasons all conspiring against you, you won't have done your Anki reviews for the day.  You'll fire up Anki and see 600 words for review and think "aaaahh, 600 reviews, I'm too tired, I'll do them tomorrow".  And then tomorrow you'll open up Anki and it'll be 800 words for review, and your brain will think, "I've been studying so hard these last few months, a small break for a day or two won't make a difference", and then before you know it, it turns in to a week and then a month and the longer it goes on the harder it gets to go back in to it because you know those Anki reviews are just piling up and piling up.

 

The key to long term success with Chinese, is consistent and regular practice and it's important to structure you learning in a way that you can sustain over a long period of time, and *not* encounter a situation like the one described above.

 

It's also important to consider what you are learning and whether your learning process is too heavily weighted towards one certain aspect e.g. vocabulary.

 

If you're doing the HSK, I can understand wanting to cover all the vocabulary for the HSK at that level, but remember the HSK is more than just reciting vocabulary.  It's no good getting all the of vocab down but then not being able to read sentences at a fast enough pace to cover all the questions.  Likewise, the vocab is no good if your listening skills aren't up to speed and you miss half the words because you can't follow along with the audio.

 

Anyway, I'm not saying don't increase the word count, but just make sure you're also getting in enough other activities besides just drilling vocabulary.  Personally when I'm in vocabulary learning mode, I don't like reviews to take up more than about 30 mins a day (out of say 1-2 hours of studying).

[Guest realmayo]

It's true that pile-up of reviews can be crippling but it's easy enough to get round it: for example you could (if you're not too familiar with Anki then it may seem like a big hassle but in reality it's only a couple of minutes work): take out all of the due cards from your too-heavy deck and separate them into new decks: you could make three new decks, split equally, separated by length of interval. Then ignore the longest-intervals deck for a few days. And prioritise the shortest-intervals deck. Or, if it's really too much, just reset and suspend the shortest-intervals deck and focus on clearing out the middle of the three. If you find you've bitten off more than you can chew, then just spit some of it out! In the future when you come back to it it'll be easier to digest second time around.

[imron]

Although from a technical perspective it is relatively easy to solve (my solution as you know is just to regularly delete my decks), from an emotional perspective the knowledge that there is a large backlog of cards can be enough to keep people procrastinating about doing anything about it - which is a vicious cycle because the longer it is left the bigger the backlog grows.

[Guest realmayo]

Oh definitely, I know that soul-crushing energy-sapping backlog gloom too well ... I remember a couple of times just pressing the space bar non-stop to answer 'correct' to hundreds of backlogged cards. Now I know how to solve the problem (as I mentioned), so it's not a problem anymore. But I agree, it's right to warn about the consequences of entering too many cards.

[Guest]

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[imron]

My advice is more just a caution to make sure you're covering yourself for this sort of thing.

 

Everyone has their own pace and their own limits and there is nothing wrong with short-term bursts of intensive study.

 

That being the case, in my opinion, the number one most important thing for long-term language acquisition is discipline and good habits that lead to consistent study over sustained periods of time.  As long as you've got that covered, the rest will work itself out.

[Guest]

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[Angelina]

You sound like a robot 

 

[joking]

 

good luck with the HSK! 

 

 

 

edit

 

are you?

a) mostly focused on passing the HSK, improving your Chinese in general won't hurt 

or

b) trying to "warm your chair" (as my primary school teacher used to say) in order to cross the coveted threshold: "can you speak Chinese" - "yes, I can"

[Guest]

[deleted]

[Angelina]

Did you sign up for the computer-based HSK?

[Guest]

Nah - paper test. I'm learning to write the characters as I go along, I practice writing them out as part of my Anki reviews. If I can't write it correctly, it counts as a fail. Takes a while, but I think it's a reasonably nice skill to have (plus it really helps with reading). Because of this, I thought it best to take the trickier route of paper over PC.

[Guest]

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[Guest]

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[mjXueHanYu]

Do you use Pleco just as a dictionary or do you use other functions as well?

[Guest]

Do you use Pleco just as a dictionary or do you use other functions as well?

 

 

Predominantly as a dictionary when I stumble across a character/word that I've never seen before - being able to swipe in characters is truly a godsend. Occasionally I use it for characters where I'm not sure of the stroke order (animated stroke orders on pleco), but not that often.

 

I tried the flash card/test section of Pleco last year and didn't fall madly in love with it, but I might pick it up again as a quick and easy way to test my current vocab against what I need to know for the exam.