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[abcdefg]

After flicking through the final ten pages of my HSK 4 frequency vocab book (admittedly in the 'super rare frequency' and 'zero frequency' sections), I found around 110 characters that I just don't know. I'm slightly unsure as to how this has happened.

 

How can you possibly convince yourself to worry about this kind of minutae? You seem to be trying to micromanage your own brain and your bodily processes to an unrealistically strict degree. Strikes me as pathological.

 

Loosen up; cut yourself some slack. You are not a robot or a machine, despite what you might wish. Human being require some down time, some play time, some time to walk in the park, listen to music and eat ice cream.

[Guest]

How can you possibly convince yourself to worry about this kind of minutae? You seem to be trying to micromanage your own brain and your bodily processes to an unrealistically strict degree. Strikes me as pathological.

 

 

 

Ta for the concern - I'm really not that worried about those characters. I've added ~25 of them to my Anki deck and I don't really know if I'm going to bother with getting them all down. My sentence there wasn't meant so much as an indicator of worry as it was of surprise - I thought I'd worked out exactly how many I had left to go before I had all of the HSK 4 vocab studied, so to get to the end and find an extra 100+ still to go was a bit of a 'wait, what?' moment.

 

Loosen up; cut yourself some slack. You are not a robot or a machine, despite what you might wish. Human being require some down time, some play time, some time to walk in the park, listen to music and eat ice cream.

 

 

That's definitely happening in moderation - joys of a 10hr work week. ;)

  

[LinZhenPu]

You're doing far better than me - I can't even get myself to put the characters from my current lessons into Anki. Any motivation tips?

[imron]

Don't really on motivation.

Focus instead on developing habits and discipline.

[LinZhenPu]

Heh, any tips on that?

[imron]

Decide on a minimum amount of time each day to study.  Ideally it should be at least 30 mins, and should be something that you can do every day without too much difficulty, even when life gets in the way.

 

Then use a tool like Don't Break the Chain, or my own 100% and try to make the longest chain you can of '30 mins Chinese study'.

 

The key is to build up a habit of consistent daily study over a prolonged period of time, and so the amount you decide should be something that is relatively easy to achieve daily.

 

You are always free to study *more* than this amount, but the minimum amount you should always do.

 

For that study time, try to keep distractions at bay - turn off phone notifications, email notifications and anything else that beeps, rings or otherwise takes you away from the task at hand.

 

Once you get to a month, you'll be on the way to developing a good habit.  Once you get to 3 months the habit will formed enough that you can probably do away with tracking the chain - though feel free to keep doing so if you like.

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[LinZhenPu]

Great advice. I should have mentioned I'm at a school receiving 4 hours of 1-on-1 tutoring a day (Mandarin). Of course, participating in this requires much less self-motivation. Given this, what would you (Napkat and imron) say?

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[LinZhenPu]

Haha, I feel like I would well and truly empty the tank after 1/4 of a session (25minutes).

[imron]

Ok, I think there are a couple of things going on here.

 

Firstly, you're already doing 4 hours of 1 on 1 study a day, which is going to be mentally exhausting.  You need to have a break of at least a couple of hours, and preferably with some sort of sustained physical activity (enough to sweat) before doing your own study.  When the brain is exhausted, it's amazing how much physical activity can help reset it.  On a similar note, make sure you have also eaten.

 

Secondly, given that you're already doing so much other study your own study sessions should focus on revision.  Not just Anki revisions, but going back over previous lessons.  You'll find that words stick more easily in your brain from context than they will from flashcard reviews.

 

Thirdly, if you're having motivational issues adding words to Anki, it seems like you are either approaching Anki burnout in which case deleting your deck and starting again is a good idea (see the reasons why this is not a bad idea here), or you don't have an automated process for adding cards and so it's consuming far more time than it should and throwing up a procrastination barrier because your mind starts to fantasize about all the reasons why it's ok not to add the words today rather than do an activity that it doesn't enjoy.

 

That's the number one reason I recommend Pleco with the flashcard addon and at least one good paid for dictionary (ABC Chinese-English, and then the Guifan if you can use Chinese-Chinese dictionaries), because it reduces flashcard maintenance time zero.  You just look up the word, click 'add', and it's done.  If you use handwriting recognition to look it up, you can essentially pass off adding the words to Pleco as writing practice.  Pleco + paid dictionaries/addons might appear expensive compared to the (mostly free) alternatives, but it really is an investment that pays off over time.

 

Given all of those things, here is what I would do.  Create three 'chains'.  One for adding words to your flashcard program, one for revising old lessons, and one for physical exercise.  These are the 3 daily habits that you should try to develop.

 

The 'adding words' chain should be done early in the day before your classes.  Wake up 30 mins earlier if you need to (though it won't actually take that long).  Make sure you solve the problem mentioned above about automatically creating cards, and this will probably only take 10-15 minutes a day.  You don't need to be learning the words when you are doing it.  The aim is simply to get the words in to your deck for later revision.  Remember the whole point here is to build this habit - getting up earlier, getting words in to the deck.  It should become part of your daily routine.  If you are not following a text book or something similar with a fixed set of new words per lesson, or you had extra new words you encountered throughout the day/lesson you should add the words from the previous day here also.

 

Assuming you have classes in the morning, the 'physical exercise' chain should be done sometime after your 1-on-1 classes have finished and before you do your 'revision' chain.  If you can't think of what do for a physical activity, try something like the 7 minute workout or similar.

 

Once you've had a bit of a break, and feel recovered physically and mentally you can then move on to your revision chain, which you should use to knock off any flashcard revisions you have, but also just as importantly, to go back over previous lessons, re-reading dialogs and texts and going over grammar points and vocab just to make sure you still remember it.  You don't have to do it in much detail, just a mental check that 'yep, I still know this stuff'.  I'd even priortise that over flashcard revision.

 

I agree with Napkat about the Pomodoro technique, however I don't like a physical timer and I find noises distracting when studying.  I mentioned what I use in another thread.

[LinZhenPu]

imron, I really appreaciate you going to this effort to provide me with advice. I just got stuck a bit on one of your points.

 

I doubt I'm approaching anki burnout because I've only made a deck of 20 anki cards.

 

The 'adding words' chain should be done early in the day before your classes.  Wake up 30 mins earlier if you need to (though it won't actually take that long).

 

How is that automatic when I need to actually look up each word in Pleco? Wouldn't be more automatic if I added each word as it came up during class? I guess this is what you mean, and spend an extra 10-15 minutes on top of doing that to add other words. Maybe from HSK4 as that's the exam I'm focusing on.

Because 10-15 minutes to add a 4 hour lesson's worth of new cards...  I managed to get one page added in about 10-15 minutes the other day and that was like maybe 1/3 of a lesson... Then again, not all lessons have so many words and  Ithink I'm overestimating how many words belong to one lesson. They're not organized, simply written down on blank pieces of paper in no particular order, which is the teacher's way of doing things. Anything I should tell the teacher to do differently?

[imron]

Ok, I had assumed that you maybe had a text book with a list of vocabulary for each lesson or something.  If you're just looking them up in class that's even easier!  Just do it then.

 

Remember one of the main goals here is to overcome the problem of 'I can't even get myself to put the characters from my current lessons into Anki.'.  If you're in class and looking them up in Pleco and adding them straight away, then it's problem solved.

 

I'd still keep a morning chain, but just use it for reviewing flashcards.  That will free up time in your later session to do actual review of previous lessons rather than just review flashcards.

 

I'm also going to point out that you don't have to add/learn *all* the new words.  In fact it's probably better that you don't.  Figure out a good limit per day, normally I'd recommend 5-10, but because you're doing what sounds like full-time intensive study it could probably go up to 15-20.  This will result in a large flashcard load so it's important to reduce it if you find flashcard sessions are starting to get unmanageable or are taking up a disproportionate amount of your overall study time.

 

Don't worry about missing out on words.  You can always add the useful ones on another day because the useful ones will keep appearing.  If they don't keep appearing, then by definition they are not useful to what you are currently reading.  Also keep in mind that you're going to be doing revision of previous lessons so you can add previously skipped words then too.

[Bigdumogre]

Imron thank you for lol the advice itt

[imron]

No worries.  Just remember that some of it was tailored to LinZhenPu's specific situation, so feel free to adapt/change things to make them more appropriate for you.  The main takeaways should be to develop habits for doing the things you want to get done, reduce pain points of using tools, and make sure to do some sort of physical activity to help refresh your brain.

[Bigdumogre]

That's what I took out of it. I burnt myself out and gave up for a while and just doing the occasional study. A 30mminute daily study is a great idea. Once it becomes a habit you do not even think twice about doing it. Same with the gym for me, I'm so used to it that its second nature to just go straight to the gym.

[imron]

I burnt myself out and gave up for a while

Said every serious Chinese learner ever :-)

 

It's also key to make this study session relatively low friction.  If you've got a huge backlog of flashcards and keep procrastinating about doing them - ignore them (or delete them!) and do something else.

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