Can't feel any progress

[vivea]

Hello everyone, I can't find a way to make myself feel like I'm having progress. I never thought that it would become a problem, but it is.

 

I tried the first thing that comes to mind: obtain HSK word lists and use them to measure my progress. I'm not going for HSK exams, but that's one way to measure progress...

 

HSK1   74.67% known   HSK2   28.29% known   HSK3   8.94% known   HSK4   1.83% known

 

So, I marked all known words in first 4 lists that I know, but that didn't help me feel like I got better. In comparison to what, to the point of zero? I started learning Chinese about a month and a week ago. I can understand very simple texts, and all those words I've marked in HSK lists as "known" I can write, so I really "know" them (there were more of those that I recognize but have doubts about writing, and those I didn't mark as known). So, I probably should clap and say 'Yay!', but somehow cold numbers don't do the job. Numbers may seem OK, but when I actually try reading anything beyond the lesson texts and dialogues in studybooks...

 

I'm not sure what my problem is. Do you guys have an idea?

 

///Extra

 

I"ll talk a little about what I'm doing, since it's likely bound to come up: I'm going through a serious online course with a teacher who is actually answering all questions, plus I'm using FSI Standard Chinese Course and a highly praised local studybook of Chinese + a set of additional English-to-Chinese translation exercises created specifically for it. Apart from that, I dabble in apps like Lingodeer and HelloChinese, which I take rather seriously, too, and learn how to write all words. Sometimes I play very simple games in Chinese, and I also take words and phrases from them, but I do it sparingly. For SRS, I mostly use Tofulearn for writing, since my main goal is reading, which automatically means I need good knowledge of characters and words, and I feel like writing characters is the best way to memorize them. Recognition often means you forgot the character, you just remember the general shape and you know that it is what you think it is from the context.

 

I must say that as the result, I feel like everything is chaotic. I've got many lists of words instead of just one and I never quite know which one to use SRS for this time. I tried going through a few studybooks at once, but they all use more or less different word lists, which led to me having more and more words to learn, still without a feeling of progress. I tried learning grammar separately. I realize that it's probably going to take years to read freely in Chinese, but I need to feel like something is going on in that direction...

 

And I have this irrational fear that I'm going to forget all words I know unless I practice writing them every other day, so the more words I learn, the more I feel overwhelmed and certain that I'll be unable to retain them. Please remember that for me, retaining a word means remembering how to write it, not only how to say it. And I do forget how to write some words. Like, in the course we've learnt "laundry service" and "post office". I haven't been reviewing that set in the deck for maybe a week or more. Now I can remember how to write the first character of laundry service and how it sounds and what it means, but not the rest. And I can remember how to write and say post office. But I feel so uncertain, as if it's going to slip my memory in a couple of weeks for good, too. The reason, I think, is that I'm learning all these words but I never see them in use anywhere. Some other words do come up, like restaurant and vegetables, those I feel confident in. But no app or text I've read mentions a laundry service or a post-office. So, there's this core vocabulary of sorts that gets used everywhere, I feel confident in that one, but about many words that I've learnt I feel like I've been wasting my time, because they don't come up and I'm bound to forget them in time.

 

If you've read all that, thank you, and I hope that you have some ideas.

[NinjaTurtle]

Vivea,

 

Do you ever talk to anyone in Chinese?

[vivea]

I tried, with a guy I found via italki. I ended up reading aloud a text I've written for myself to practice the under-used vocabulary. I was reading it and he was translating it (for me to make sure that he understands my pronunciation) and he fixed a couple of mistakes while at it. As for freestyle talking, I'm not ready for that yet.

[Shelley]

How long have you been doing all these things?

 

I would consolidate your learning materials to your online course, your text book FSI and one app. It doesn't mean ignore the others just concentrate on a few.

 

I use Pleco for my flashcards and I start a new deck for each lesson. So I don't end up with long lists to learn, I work hard on the current lesson and revise all the rest when I have a few minutes spare in the day, not all of them all the time but a constant revolution of lessons.

 

Yes you do need to keep writing, revising, reading and learning, if you are not speaking and using chinese in your everyday life then you need to keep reinforcing it.

 

There is no other way, study, revise and study and revise.

 

If you feel you are not ready for "freestyle talking" then you just have keep practising. Find some one who you can talk to at your level, if you want to learn it you have to practice it.

 

I don't see why you need a separate grammar book yet, if the textbook you are using doesn't introduce grammar at an appropriate rate think about using another text book. I am not familiar with FSI but it should have adequate grammar in the lessons.

 

Why can't you talk to someone from your "serious online course" (which one?) this should be part of the course.

 

I guess you are thinking all this person keeps say is practice, revise and study well yes that is all there is to it.

 

 

[NinjaTurtle]

Vivea,

 

Can you be more specific about your level of Chinese conversational ability? Are you familiar with what Chinese uses for present tense, past tense, future tense, and present perfect? Can you say, "This isn't a pen, it's a pencil" in Chinese without thinking about it too much? How about saying, "I eat lunch in the cafeteria everyday" in Chinese without thinking about it too much?

[vivea]

NinjaTurtle, I've only studied Chinese for about a month and a half. I can't say "This isn't a pen, it's a pencil", because I don't know the words for pen and pencil yet, I know only 笔. I know about present tense, present continuous, the usage of 了, but overall my knowledge is very elementary.

 

How about saying, "I eat lunch in the cafeteria everyday"

Yes, that's simple. I'd write it faster than say it, though.

 

 

Shelley

I wanted a separate grammar book to reinforce the grammar. It has exercises with keys, and I wanted more practice exercises focused on grammar.

 

"Why can't you talk to someone from your "serious online course" (which one?)"

There's just one teacher, if I kept posting long enough messages in Chinese for her to read\fix and reply to every day, that'd probably be a bit rude. She isn't a private tutor of mine, after all. Questions she replies to are mostly about the content of her lessons (word usage, grammar, pronunciation and such), I asked some, but everything's clear enough for me to be left without questions recently. And the course is in Russian, that's why I didn't name it.

 

I don't mind  "study, revise, and so on, and so forth", but maybe I'm missing a good program that would tell me which words I still remember and which to revise today. I started out with Anki, but moved on to Tofulearn for writing practice, as it's much faster to write in Tofu than write on paper, which saves a lot of time. Tofu is no good when telling me when and what to practice, though, e.g. once you've learnt a word it offers it for review on the next day only, and once you've done that, it offers it in about a week. I've heard good things about Skritter, maybe it's better, but I don't have funds for their insane subscription price. It's alright for a one-time purchase, but monthly? These guys are delusional, they think that all their potential users live in top-notch American and Western-European cities with top-notch wages. Then again, most other paid resources are equally delusional about it.

 

Maybe I could use Anki (which I've heard has the best SRS algorithm) and rather than write on paper, I could "write" in the air with my finger, producing an image in my head? Do you think that would work equally well? It feels more rewarding to actually write, but you've made me see that my problem is that I've got no smart program to tell me which words to practice on which day. That's why it all feels so chaotic and overwhelming.

[Shelley]

Is Russian your first language? 

 

I didn't mean talk to your teacher, I meant someone else on the course who would be at the same level as you. 

 

If you have only been learning for a month and a half I defiantly would recommend you get Pleco, it has an excellent flash card system and lots of dictionaries to choose from, at your level I would just go with the free ones until you know enough to know what dictionaries to go for. There is a one off cost, I considered it not too expensive but if you that is too much for you at the moment, there is the free version, flashcards are functional but not as configurable as the paid version. Have a look here http://www.pleco.com/

 

For someone at this very early stage it seems to me you have got a lot going on, I am not surprised you are confused, take one thing at a time, learn it thoroughly and then move on to another one.

 

If you have no smart program to tell you what words to practice on what day, just practice them all until you don't even have to think about to get it right. Remember for each character you need to learn its tone, what it means, how to write it, what part of speech is and what it goes with to make words. remember most Chinese words are at least 2 characters if not 3 or sometimes 4.

 

IMO writing is the very best way to remember them, so cover sheets and sheets of grid paper with your practising. Say out loud the pronunciation with the correct tone and meaning as you write it.

Don't do it till you are just doing it mindlessly, do 10 characters, then stretch, walk around, look out the window, glace at another book or something else then go back to your studies and do another 10 or the same 10 depending on how well you feel you know them.

 

Remember you are only 6 weeks into what is going to be long journey down the road of Chinese language learning. Don't be so hard on yourself its only been 6 weeks, I am still learning and revising 30 years later, admittedly I don't have any deadlines, or exams to do and I do it for the simple pleasure of learning Chinese, it is my passion. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[Shelley]

Also I use Tofu, just started again lately and IIRC you can configure how often it shows you words, so if you feel it doesn't show it to you enough I believe you can change this.

[vivea]

I think I might've given people the wrong idea. It's not that I don't have any progress, I just can't feel it! And I don't know how to make myself feel it. That's why I tried using HSK lists as a measuring stick, but they just don't correspond to my actual experience in reading.

 

I've only learnt European languages before, and that's easier. Not only there's an alphabet and it's easy to memorize new words, but there are many common roots across languages. I studied a few at school,  including a dead one (Latin),  that really put things into perspective for me later.

 

But with Chinese, I feel frustrated b\c I can't read texts from day one and b\c it's so much more difficult to memorize written words. I think it's more of a psychological problem than an actual sign of being stuck. It'd be ridiculous to expect tangible results so soon, after all.

 

And I've heard 'scary stories' about people with a 3 000 baggage of characters who can't read newspapers freely. That sounds dreadful.

 

///

Shelley,

I use Tofu in an automated mode, b\c there's no way to practice writing in its manual mode, and for now my complaints are that its writing mode offers reviews too rarely and the process of editing decks is bugged. But for all my complaints, Tofu is really easy to copy to and copy from, you can import and export between it and Anki fast, and the built-in dictionary is wonderful. And yes, my first language is Russian. As for Pleco, I already have Hanping Pro + OCR.

 

And I have a question related to SRS specifically.  Do you have a main deck with all your vocabulary or multiple ones? If there's one, then is it Chinese-to-English or English-to-Chinese, or both? I tend to think that practicing in both directions wastes double time, but maybe I'm wrong.

 

Last but not least, what about hints? When I used anki, I created an additional field for hints, it was really helpful. I'd like to keep all hints somewhere in one place to be able to look hints for any learnt word up if I forget them, but so far I can't figure out how to do it best. A huge anki deck with all vocabulary and hints? A separate huge document for hints only? Just in case, by 'hints' I mean something like 'a 100 lying on its side' for 百 or 'a mouth-action for: the sun is wrapped around the person from all sides' for 喝.

[amytheorangutan]

Hi @vivea I also only started learning Chinese, a little bit longer than you but beginner stage is still very clear in my mind. I also like to be able to see small progress to keep me motivated. There are a few things I did and some of them I'm still doing everyday to validate my progress. 

 

I'm using Skritter for 20 mins everyday on the way to work for characters and words acquisition. Looking at the number of characters I know go up and the retention stats at a healthy percentage definitely give me that validation, I think Anki is the free version of Skritter. 

 

I use Hello Chinese app which has loads of free exercises and tests on sentence, grammar and pronunciation. I have set mine not to display pinyin for the extra challenge. When you complete one section then you can move on to the next, the pronunciation part has score and tells you syllables that you're pronouncing incorrectly. I think once you completed a few levels of these you will most likely see your progress as the exercises get more complicated. 

 

I'm reading graded readers books. Once you acquire maybe 400 characters, you can look into 300 words books like Mandarin Companion, Chinese Breeze etc. You will definitely feel progress when you recognise most of the words and characters.

 

I also use Chinesepod and listen to their dialogues. There was a point when I listen to most of the dialogues in beginner/elementary lessons and I understood almost all of them and that definitely showed progress to me. There must be free short dialogues somewhere on youtube etc that you can use as well. 

 

I have weekly lessons and the homework my teacher always gives me is to construct dialogues and narratives. I would construct them then read them aloud while recording myself then listen to my pronunciation and try to fix them. My teacher then fix any words usage or grammar mistakes I make and she also makes me read them out. I'm sure if you go from 6 sentence dialogues to 20 sentence and a few paragraphs of narratives you would see it as a progress, especially if the person correcting you no longer corrects basic mistakes and go on to correct more complicated grammar.

 

This is something that I have just started thinking of doing but I'm going to go through the grammar points by level from https://resources.allsetlearning.com/chinese/grammar/Grammar_points_by_level and making up my own sentences that I would actually use if I'm talking to a friend using the grammar points. 

 

Hope some of these would be helpful to you

[Shelley]

I am no expert with Tofu, but I think it would worth having a look at the topic here on the forum and ask the question you have about frequency of words appearing.  https://www.chinese-forums.com/forums/topic/53507-tofu-learn-for-learning-hanzi/?tab=comments#comment-409466

 

10 hours ago, vivea said:

Do you have a main deck with all your vocabulary or multiple ones?

I use Pleco for my flashcards, I make a deck for each new lesson, about 30-40 characters and words made from these ones. I work very hard on my new ones till the next lesson when it joins the other decks to be reviewed regularly but not as often as the lesson i am working on. With Pleco flashcards you can have more than 2 "sides" to a card so I learn all possible combinations, English to Characters, to Pinyin to Characters, Meaning to Tone to Pinyin and so on.

 

As for hints I dislike them intensely, it is my personal preference not to have anything to do with hints. I feel it is only an extra layer of unnecessary stuff that gets in the way. What you need to do is learn the components (or radicals which are similar) of characters (in Pleco there is a paid for dictionary by Outlier that has all this information) then you can start to say ah yes this component means x and this one means y so together it could mean this.Also the more characters you learn the more connections you will see and it will become much easier to remember and recognise them.

 

At 6 weeks you should be pleased you have got as far as you have and do not expect too much too soon, you will reach a point when you go "Oh wow I get it, that makes sense or I can read that" then you will plateau, not seem to make progress then wow another level reached and so on. This is the experience of many learners, some though, it is true just plough on up that learning hill till they reach the top, but I suspect some of them slide back a bit every so often, so enjoy each little wow moment and just keep working at it. 

[BearXiong]

19 hours ago, vivea said:

I realize that it's probably going to take years to read freely in Chinese, but I need to feel like something is going on in that direction...

 

You might try reading some of the Mandarin Companion graded readers. It feels good to finish your first graded reader!

 

Here are some other ideas for benchmarking your progress from Hacking Chinese.

[mungouk]

Hi @vivea,

 

I realise you're an experienced learner in the context of European languages, but to be frank — 5 or 6 weeks is really not very long at all for Chinese. This will take a long, long time.

 

If this is your first non-European language as well, then you need to be even more patient.  Your brain will need to do quite a bit of re-wiring, and this takes time.

 

Also you don't say how often you are studying. In my case I started with one lesson per week and at that time I retained very little. Since changing to 2-3 lessons per week (and doing homework at the same rate) I found it made a big difference.

 

Good luck!

 

[vivea]

On 8/15/2018 at 3:53 AM, ciscotechwannabe said:

Reading Help:

LEGOO MANDARIN DAVID YAO 1,337 FREE Videos-> He prides himself in his reading technique:
https://www.youtube.com/user/LEGOOMANDARIN/featured?disable_polymer=1

This is great! Exactly the kind of learning style that feels very rewarding rather than 'nothing's going on...'

 

For everyone else, the guy in the videos takes a character and shows a lot of words with it as a component. They're simple enough (at least from those playlists I've chosen), so often you know all the components. It makes you feel like it's easy to learn a lot of new words at once and gives a feeling of progress. This is a great style for those whose primary purpose is reading.

 

That reminds me of a Kanji book I've got (at first I wanted to study Japanese, but changed my mind). It's called Kanji Basic and it uses exactly the same style. First, it introduces new characters, then shows you words made from these characters as components, and then provides you with some exercises to test how you've remembered everything. I didn't think it was that important and forgot about it, but now I'm going to try using that book for Chinese! Japanese pronunciations can just be ignored, many combined words are written the same way in Chinese, although not all, but looking them up in a dictionary should help with that and with their pronunciations.

 

So now I think it's my learning style that made me feel stuck. Or rather the teaching style of the online course I'm going through and the studybook I'm using. They're both very academic and don't care how you memorize new words and characters, and they teach you many compex words with no explanation, like words made up of up to 3 new characters at once. Many new words are typically quite different from each other, too, and not made of the same component characters, so it's no surprise I started to feel challenged. I just didn't know that there was another kind of learning style.

 

I wonder if anyone has had the same type of experience.

[vivea]

22 hours ago, amytheorangutan said:

I'm using Skritter for 20 mins everyday on the way to work for characters and words acquisition. Looking at the number of characters I know go up and the retention stats at a healthy percentage definitely give me that validation, I think Anki is the free version of Skritter. 

Out of curiosity, how many characters and\or words do you typically review in 20 minutes? Do you ever have any kind of backlogs accumulating, like characters and words that you haven't memorized well enough once, and now you're swamped with too many?

 

I must've been doing something wrong. When I used memrise in combination with Tofu, it started to take me around 40 minutes just to review the phrases on memrise, and that wasn't even all I was doing... So, in addition to more memrise and the time I spent with Tofu at writing, that quickly turned into 2 hours per day, which led to me feeling like something was wrong and taking a pause. But it's mostly likely the fault of me not having a better program to create a sensible schedule, I really should go back to Anki. Memrise was crazy for making me review fifty phrases for 40 minutes, really, I don't know what kind of algorythm it uses, but that wasn't normal. Granted, I told it to make me review that much, but I defined the quantity of phrases, not minutes. It's beyond me why it was taking so long.

[Flickserve]

On 8/15/2018 at 3:26 AM, vivea said:

 

I'm not sure what my problem is. Do you guys have an idea?

 

It's Chinese and you need to readjust your expectations of progress. Much slower for Chinese. 

[DavyJonesLocker]

I think you need to limit the time and amount of words you review in anki, or other SRS system . It can become a chicken and egg situation whereby you spend too long on these system and not enough time for actually reading, listening. Further the less you read the harder it is to actually remember these words and this number of daily reviews starts to build up to an unacceptable level (especially if you stop for a week)

 

I limit mine to max 100 written characters and maybe 400 to 500 words a day but mainly because I have time now and I am going through a back log after a long break (10 months of no study) and a deck of 6000+

 

An SRS system is just a tool and should be employed with appropriate use. For example it appears I know 5000 words from anki but in reality it just means I know the pinyin and tones (mostly) with s vague idea of the meaning. How to use the word I only get from reading it speaking. Relying on anki alone would be of no use.

 

 

 

 

[vivea]

18 hours ago, Shelley said:

As for hints I dislike them intensely, it is my personal preference not to have anything to do with hints. I feel it is only an extra layer of unnecessary stuff that gets in the way. What you need to do is learn the components (or radicals which are similar) of characters (in Pleco there is a paid for dictionary by Outlier that has all this information) then you can start to say ah yes this component means x and this one means y so together it could mean this.Also the more characters you learn the more connections you will see and it will become much easier to remember and recognise them.

I'm not sure I understand your way of thinking and studying. What do you do with those words that make no sense when you look at them, even if you know all components and their meanings? That occurs frequently, as usually the word is a combination of a semantic part and a phonetic part. Do you study phonetics separately?

 

I tried the Outlier's demo on the site and I honestly think it wouldn't benefit me much. Too many explanations run like: 'this is a corrupted form of this original character...', and that doesn't help me remember. On the contrary, now I have to remember more, like what kind of original character there was and what meaning it had. I don't think my memory can hold that much! It's very interesting, but I feel like it would definitely make it harder for me to remember how to write and not easier. Not saying it's bad, it simply doesn't fit my thinking style and my memory capacity isn't big enough.

 

I noticed that memory at the first day of learning, or sometimes during only the first few hours, is photographic. Take a set of new characters and words, and you learn them instantly and easily. I typically look up all the components I don't already know, make something up to remember in which order to write them for future reference and that's it. And I remember all of it perfectly. If I try to practice more, a vivid image flashes in my mind, and I can just write whatever complex word from that image without thinking.

 

But the next day is a very different story. Suddenly the photographic memory is almost completely gone, I forgot what I've read about the components, and that's when my hints about components and their order come in handy. If I remember them, that is... And I usually don't remember very well, b\c I didn't need them on the first day at all. So, I spend some time using those hints, and in a while I don't need them anymore, the photographic memory is back. But later if I don't practice a word for a while, the photographic memory fails again, and I need the hints... It's like a rollercoaster. That was my long-winded explanation why I use hints and need a database to retrieve them once forgotten. Your memory must work differently.

 

Sometimes I memorize words just by looking at them and they do stay in the memory, so I don't bother to practice writing them. But if I see a very similar character later, I realize that I haven't learnt it well enough just by looking alone. The difference can be just a tiny line or a dot, but suddenly I realize I'm not sure if that character had that extra line or not. E.g. 候 and 侯.

[amytheorangutan]

11 minutes ago, vivea said:

Out of curiosity, how many characters and\or words do you typically review in 20 minutes? Do you ever have any kind of backlogs accumulating, like characters and words that you haven't memorized well enough once, and now you're swamped with too many

I think I normally do around a couple hundred a day. Let me check today to make sure but I turn off the definition and reading parts of skritter so I only do writing and tones. 

 

And yes definitely have been in that situation before especially after a holiday. No work around it other than spend the next week or so doing 45 mins a day instead of 20 mins to catch up. 

[mungouk]

3 minutes ago, amytheorangutan said:

especially after a holiday. No work around it

 

Skritter has a vacation mode that you can enable on your subscriptions page... this pauses billing too. 

 

Doesn't it prevent reviews piling up while you're away?