How much time do you spend on flashcards?

[DanielG]

I am curious as to how other people study their flashcards.  I used Anki for a while, creating my own cards, but then abandoned it for Pleco's advanced flashcard system which comes with their bundle.  I started out with four separate tests, one each for listening recognition, where I only hear the spoken chinese, reading recognition where I only see the characters, recall, where I only see the definition, and writing, where I see the definition and have to write the character.  I later dropped writing, because I started using Inkspot, which I like better for writing.  I do these tests every day, and even  without the writing, (which I don't do regularly), it usually takes about an hour to get through the three tests, with the total amount of cards fluctuating between about 120 and 250 per day.  This is about half of the time I spend studying Chinese, which seems a bit excessive.  On the one hand, I feel like an hour is more time than I want to spend doing flashcards, on the other hand, it feels like I'm getting tangible results, and I don't want to drop any of my four tests.  I'm curious how much time other people spend on flashcards.  I've added a poll, but I'd love to hear people's comments as well.

[dtcamero]

i spend a lot of time doing SRS flashcards.

maybe 2-3 hours a day.

i've been doing this for about 7 years now lol.

i now speak japanese fluently and can get by in china.

so ya i think SRS is pretty much the key to the kingdom if you have the free energy to guarantee time every day for it. 

obvs i also read and socialize in my L2 / L3. but anki i think was def the most important factor. 

 

in short, my self-study course:

anki'ing 3-4k characters leads to literacy. 

anki'ing 10k vocab cards means you can function

anki'ing 4k subs2SRS cards means you can understand what you hear.

read 100 manga. then read 20 novels. watch lots of tv/movies.

date a native speaker (or several)

???

profit.

[Flickserve]

9 minutes ago, dtcamero said:

date a native speaker (or several)

 

crap, I missed the real reason for studying with anki.

[dtcamero]

dating L2 natives -> improved L2

and

improving L2 -> dating more L2 natives

 

it's a virtuous cycle

[JeroenB]

I used to spend about 20-30 mins a day on flashcards, which was the bulk of my studying. Because of this, I spent little to no time on listening or reading. So recently I stopped doing SRS all together, giving me more time to spend on other types of studying.

 

I do feel ideally I should do both, so I might start using flashcards again although with less cards than before.

[大块头]

A few years ago I decided to enlarge my Chinese vocabulary with SRS, so I created a (passive-recognition) deck based on the SUBTLEX-CH word frequency list in Anki and started studying them for about 1-2 hours a day. I passed the HSK 6 in November 2016. Since then I've started spending more time reading Chinese novels (about 30 minutes/day) and listening to Chinese podcasts (about 1 hour a day), both of which I wouldn't be able to do if I hadn't expanded my vocabulary.

 

I've stopped adding cards to my deck, so my daily reviews have been slowly decreasing. My deck of approximately 8000 active cards only takes about 15 minutes a day to study.

[Kalthof]

Well this won't be an answer regarding flashcards but I use the book (and workbook) New Practical Chinese. This could be an answer on your question because if I understand you correctly you want to divide your time in a structured and 'honest' way. So you can learn writing/reading/listening AND speaking. 

 

I like this way of studying because you learn all these skills on an equally level. I start out with learning to write the whole character list(50 max) of the chapter and pay close attention to the pinyin(mà/má e.g.). This takes me around 90 minutes with full focus(normally a lot more because I tend to write here/do something else at the same time instead of continue studying :P). Secondly I try to comprehend the dialogues (in the textbook) by reading the characters(pinyin is available). So this way I am repeating the vocabulary list and I prepare myself for the listening exercises. The first listening exercise is an audio of the dialogue. On Youtube there are videos of the dialogues available but I like the CD because I can hear the tones better. I pause the CD after every sentence and repeat it out loud. Same with second audio of the vocabulary list. After I finish more exercises containing speaking/listening and reading comprehension/paraphrasing. I start with the grammer of the chapter. All these things you put in practise by yourself in the workbook. In the same order. So it starts with all kind of listening and speaking exercises. So for example you hear a sentence and you have to fill in the missing charater in the blanks. Or you have to listen to questions and answer them in Chinese sentences. Or they give you a character and you have to make a sentence out of it. 

 

Anyway to summarize this comment, which is already too long. They give you a learning path and you can learn all skills on an equally level. They continue on what you have learned so this way you repeat all kind of things on a natural way. 

 

Hope this helps.

[dtcamero]

forgive me for a slightly dissenting opinion... backed up by seven years of aggressive language self-study. 

 

i find the idea of setting out to study the four skills (reading/writing/listening/speaking) in equal measures kind of upsetting in how little it seems to be grounded in anything useful other than the fact that there are four skills to learn.

that doesn't mean that an efficient study practice involves learning them all at an equal level.

 

famed linguistic professor stephen krashen provides a pretty convincing description of why the most important elements of language acquisition happen almost exclusively within passive input (listening / reading) and not through active output (speaking / writing).

from the beginning I found Krashen's ideas very reasonable, and focused almost all of most of my energies on these passive skills. I then spend a month or two in the country of my L2 / 3 every year.

when I am there, my active speaking/writing skills jump at a tremendous level, about to where my passive skills are... and then plateau. 

then I go home and repeat the process. it's been very productive for me.

 

here are some good videos of Krashen discussing his research and famous book the input hypothesis

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NiTsduRreug

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3QyX9XhGX3s

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vh6Hy6El86Q

[AdamD]

Right now, 10–30 minutes per day. Leading up to an exam, many hours. When I don't have exams and am not loading new words, almost never.

 

In my early years I was obsessed with flashcards. It got me where I am now, but these days I spend most of my time using the language.

[Shelley]

I use the New Practical Chinese Reader too and find them very good. In my blog I have written an explanation of how I use NPCR but the point I want to make here is how I use Flashcards.

Pleco allows you to make new categories so I make a new one for each lesson. I then study the lesson's words/characters going through each test at least once at the beginning of the lesson and then I review/test as I go through the lesson. The amount of time I spend on flashcards is about 5-10% of my learning time.

 

I now have a categories for each of my lesson, sometimes I will add duplicate characters if they being used in a new combination, but often I won't add them, so there should only be one copy of each character. I can review old lessons when I want to.

 

I find this way of organising my flashcards means I don't have huge lists to work my way through. I believe flashcards are good for learning characters but not for memorising them. I like to learn new words in context and to memorise characters I prefer to use HanziGrids and write characters by hand to memorise and aid muscle memory which I think is very useful.

 

As with all these "which method is better" discussions it all depends on what you want to learn, if you don't want to learn to write characters ( which I think you should, but that is another discussion) then my method of using HanziGrids is not much use for you. It all depends on what is good for you. Try things, there is no rule that says you can't change your mind. Once you have tried a few things, pick what you like and settle down to consistent learning schedule, a little every day is better than large intermittent sessions.

 

 

 

 

[Flickserve]

1 hour ago, dtcamero said:

famed linguistic professor stephen krashen provides a pretty convincing description of why the most important elements of language acquisition happen almost exclusively within passive input (listening / reading) and not through active output (speaking / writing).

 

I also found Krashen just after I increased listening time. It is the reason why I have decreased flashcarding.

[zander1]

On 25/04/2017 at 3:03 AM, 大块头 said:

A few years ago I decided to enlarge my Chinese vocabulary with SRS,

 

I was just wondering what sort of Anki deck this was? Was it Chinese to English (characters on front, definition on back) or the other way around (or indeed both)? Was it just words, or sentences?