Spoonfed Chinese

[Jan Finster]

5 minutes ago, haveheart said:

My only issue with it is it takes so much time to make new cards. I actually do this with Japanese and probably spend about 2 hours a week creating new cards to study. Do you tend to make note of new words while you're watching stuff, then make cards for them later?

 

Well, I use Lingq.com (premium version; ~100$/year). This makes it super easy. For examples, when I read the subtitles of a TV show with Lingq, I can mark the sentence or part of the sentence and this will automatically go into a vocabulary database for this TV show. In fact even if I highlight only one word, Lingq saves the corresponding sentence that contains this word. I can review the sentences with Lingq, but I prefer to export them to Excel and then use Tofu Learn, Anki or other apps to review the sentences. Overall super easy. 

 

[matteo]

14 hours ago, Flickserve said:

Just to clarify, do you already know all of the vocabulary in these sentences that you are practicing?

 

Generally yes, I tend to be always ahead in vocabulary and behind in my ability to use it. 

There are a few words here and there that I don't know; if I think they are interesting/useful, I just take a screenshot of the sentence and add it to my main anki deck (the one I use to actually learn words).

 

I tend to suspend all those cards that are too boring or seem to be useless. Some have mistakes, mostly in the pinyin (I use the free version) but well...you shouldn't be looking at the pinyin anyways!:D

I agree that the content is not always the most stimulating, I would consider creating my own cards from scratch if I had the time but I don't think it's an option at the moment.

 

As it is, in spite of all the issues, I think this is a good way to see and try to actively produce structures you are less familiar with. 

For instance, if you have:

"It's so windy, her hat was almost blown away"

I would translate:

风太大了，几乎吹了他的帽子

Whereas spoonfed suggests:

风很大，差点儿把她的帽子刮跑了

 

Because you are trying really hard to actively recall it and repeat it, it sticks in your memory much better. So next time I have to say something similar, I'll hopefully have more options and might be able to produce a more natural-sounding sentence.

 

 

 

[ChTTay]

13 hours ago, Jan Finster said:

Well, I use Lingq.com

Doesn’t seem to work in China! 

[Jan Finster]

7 hours ago, ChTTay said:

Doesn’t seem to work in China!

 

When I visit China, I use VPN for Lingq, etc.

 

[ChTTay]

On 2/19/2020 at 7:42 PM, Jan Finster said:

 

When I visit China, I use VPN for Lingq,

Living here, they’re not reliable enough so I tend to avoid anything subscription based that needs one if I can. You can have weeks without access. Especially in Beijing. 
 

Anyway, I just mentioned it in case you didn’t know as I (think?) saw you had plans to come here at some point. And for anyone else who was wondering.

 

so, sticky study... 

 

Are the mistakes that bad? 

[Jan Finster]

15 hours ago, ChTTay said:

Anyway, I just mentioned it in case you didn’t know as I (think?) saw you had plans to come here at some point. And for anyone else who was wondering.

Thanks!

 

15 hours ago, ChTTay said:

Are the mistakes that bad? 

I do not remember exactly how many mistakes there were. But, if I, as a beginner back, then spotted some mistakes, the intermediates and advanced would spot even more mistakes I would not even aware of at that time.

 

If Lingq does not work, sentence mining can also be done manually by copy/pasting sentences you read into Excel and using GOOGLETRANSLATE for the automatic translations (even if they are not perfect, they give you the gist).

[haveheart]

I think the majority of the mistakes in this deck are inaccurate or incomplete translations. I've found that if the card's english translation is often missing some important context. 

For example I recently learned the word 衙门 (which seems pretty obscure to me but it stuck well enough). The Chinese sentence was "这里曾经是政府衙门"  and The English translation was "This place was once a government office". I'm in the habit of checking pleco as I learn new cards, so i saw that 衙门 actually is a government office in feudal China. 

The word clicked so easily for me that I didn't make any edits to the card to clarify for my future self when i see it in reviews, but if the word was trickier I would have made a quick clarifying note on the back of the card.  I've been using the deck primarily for the Chinese sentences and audio, so the english on the back acts as more of a hint that I've understood the card. 

 

Personally the mental load of learning new words with this deck is so low that I don't mind checking pleco or making a note if i need to. 

 

But yeah as Jan said, there are lots of good sentence mining options out there (subs2srs etc). 

Quick side note about making sentence cards.  The guys behind MIA (the rebirth of ajatt if you will) have made a handy Dictionary addon for anki that works with Chinese https://massimmersionapproach.com/table-of-contents/anki/mia-dictionary/
You can import your own JSON format dictionaries and it helps speed up the card creation process.

[ChTTay]

13 hours ago, haveheart said:

But yeah as Jan said, there are lots of good sentence mining options out there (subs2srs etc). 

I just don’t want to make my own ?
 

Any alternative to Spoonfed though? 

[Jan Finster]

4 hours ago, ChTTay said:

Any alternative to Spoonfed though?

 

Non-personalised sentences are a dime a dozen:

1. Chinesepod
2. Glossika
3. https://www.plecoforums.com/threads/18-896-hsk-sentences.5615/
4. https://www.plecoforums.com/threads/mnemosyne-20-000-chinese-sentences-hsk-level-1.1846/
5. https://www.plecoforums.com/threads/hsk-level-1-3-example-sentences.3715/
6. http://www.hskhsk.com/2/post/2013/11/hsk-1-example-sentences.html
7. http://www.hskhsk.com/2/post/2013/11/hsk-3-example-sentences.html

 

[ChTTay]

A dime a dozen but not quite the same. I have Glossika from when it was just audio and PDFs. Would love it if they were Anki decks but never figured out how to do it in an easy way. As I understand it, it’s a subscription service now with their own software etc.

 

The second on the list looks decent. The rest all HSK 1-3 so not so useful for me. 
 

This looks promising but seems to have words with example sentences rather than studying sentences. 

https://blog.timo-horstschaefer.de/chinese-anki-deck/
 

Anyway, back to Spoonfed ? 

[xinoxanu]

@haveheart I am trying to get back to formal study after a year where life got in the way... so I am curious: have you seen a substantial improvement in your language studies by using spoon-fed over the past year? (others are of course welcome to chime in, I just remember that s/he and I had similar Chinese levels).

 

Also wondering if this link to purchase the improved deck is legit:https://gumroad.com/l/IEmpwF? It seems that the original link, at a different platform, is not working anymore.

[k9frame]

@xinoxanu

That's the right link. Deck from there has 8000 cards with sentences and audio.

I'm only 200 cards in, looks like the sentences are becoming more interesting. 

 

Also curious with your guy's progress. 

 

[haveheart]

Hey @xinoxanu! Thanks for asking. Yep, that ones legit.  I actually reached out to the guy through that site since my download link from the other site wasn't working anymore. 

I'll give some stats about where I got to with this deck first: 

Over 304 days I learned 2400 words. If I count the words I already knew that i deleted from the deck as I went through it brought me to about 6000 words/cards. I stopped adding new cards to it a month or two ago with 2000ish cards left unseen. At this point I felt really comfortable watching dramas with a bunch of gaps in understanding and needed a few episodes to get attuned to some of the characters/world and feel less overwhelmed by the vocab I didn't know yet. 
After, I transitioned to using subs2srs decks made from chinese and taiwanese dramas. I watched 盗墓笔记 and learned most of the new words from there (season 1), then a few shows on netflix cause it was easy to grab the subtitles. 

Overall I think it worked really well since I was lazy and wanted high quality words/audio spoon fed to me. Now that i've gotten in the groove of using subs2srs though I'd say its worth the time to set that and morphman up. It for sure takes more time to make the cards and figure out which words to study but the words are immediately useful to understanding the shows you're watching.

Full disclosure: As is my habit, I've taken a break from Chinese in favour of giving Japanese my full attention for a while. But the shift away from Chinese has nothing to do with the study method. When I return to Chinese after some time I'll be picking up where I left off. 

If you're starting back out with a bunch of energy, I would say skip spoonfed deck and get all the morphman/ subs2srs stuff in your life. But my plan with stopping spoonfed was to use it when I've been too busy to make new cards with subs2srs.
Hope this helps!!

[xinoxanu]

33 minutes ago, haveheart said:

If you're starting back out with a bunch of energy, I would say skip spoonfed deck and get all the morphman/ subs2srs

 

I definitely want to hear more about this. Any wiki with the info on how to set it up?

 

I am also glad to hear that spoonfed worked for you and that you actually achieved quite impressive results with it. I may actually go the same way as you, because I am also too lazy to make decks to start with, but one way or another I really do need to leave the plateau where I'm at (my vocabulary has grown only 100 words in a year... I know ?).

 

By the way, have you returned back to Skritter or done flashcards through Pleco?

[haveheart]

16 hours ago, xinoxanu said:

I definitely want to hear more about this. Any wiki with the info on how to set it up?

This is the guide I used for Morphman: https://massimmersionapproach.com/table-of-contents/anki/morphman
This is a nice dictionary add on for anki too: https://massimmersionapproach.com/table-of-contents/anki/mia-dictionary/ 
This is for subs2srs: http://subs2srs.sourceforge.net/ 
For the subs2srs theres a few tricks for making decks out of whole tv shows at once. Having trouble finding a video covering it at the moment but feel free to reach out if you get stuck. 

 

16 hours ago, xinoxanu said:

 

I am also glad to hear that spoonfed worked for you and that you actually achieved quite impressive results with it. I may actually go the same way as you, because I am also too lazy to make decks to start with, but one way or another I really do need to leave the plateau where I'm at (my vocabulary has grown only 100 words in a year... I know ?).

This was exactly why i wanted spoonfed. It's now been 10 years since I stared learning Chinese and for most of that time I was progressing at a snails pace.  Finally bit the bullet and started watching more Chinese shows and just getting words in. Sounds like we've got a similar history with Chinese so I hope you find this useful too! 
 

16 hours ago, xinoxanu said:

By the way, have you returned back to Skritter or done flashcards through Pleco?

I know a lot of people have had success with them so I tried a few times to make both a part of my routine to no avail. I found that I got burnt out on skritter reviews, I think I got to like 1000 characters or so last time I went through. Writing is a big gap for me though so at some point I'll return to it or figure out another way to study writing. 
Pleco is still my main dictionary on my phone but I found that anki was just more robust. I really benefit from having audio and a contextual sentence on the card too. 

edit:
I feel like I should also highlight that I feel like I made great progress in understanding tv, because I watched a lot of tv. So Spoonfed handed me the new words, and chinese media gave me normal chinese to digest, which was made easier by learning new words. Might be obvious but I found myself not watching much Chinese media for years and that definitely didn't help my progress lol

[xinoxanu]

Many thanks for all the feedback and all the great resources @haveheart, bookmarking this thread so I can have it on hand. Hopefully this weekend I'll have enough time to get everything ready for a new weekly routine.

[xinoxanu]

Well, everything's properly set up now. Started by deleting about 500 cards by using Anki's PC version and then syncing it to ankiweb... might delete more in the upcoming days, but so far so good. The android app is not as aesthetically pleasant as I'd personally like, but at least it's functional (and free, can't really complain!).

 

Will report back on the progress in the upcoming weeks. Wish me luck! ?

[Flickserve]

On 6/4/2020 at 8:52 PM, haveheart said:

For the subs2srs theres a few tricks for making decks out of whole tv shows at once. Having trouble finding a video covering it at the moment but feel free to reach out if you get stuck. 

 

Not a video but some documentation of the process.

 

 

https://www.chinese-forums.com/forums/topic/42254-ideas-wanted-how-would-you-improve-this-study-process-for-new-vocabsyntax-acquisition/?tab=comments#comment-318501

[haveheart]

On 6/6/2020 at 7:45 PM, xinoxanu said:

Started by deleting about 500 cards by using Anki's PC version and then syncing it to ankiweb

I forgot to mention I do mosttt of my card creation on my pc, then I sync and do reviews on my phone. One more thing that comes to mind on the topic of syncing is the amount of time it takes to sync when I make a new subs2srs deck can be quite long. Something that helps reduce that time is by 
1. Make the deck and import into anki (PC)
2. Go to Tools > MorphMan >  and run Recalc
3. Go to the Browser and find the deck (I use a sentence bank with all my subs2srs decks within, so I select that.
4. Search for tag:0T by adding this at the end of the deck name with a space eg: "deck:SentenceBank tag:0T"
5. Select and delete all 0T (zero target) cards. 
6. run Tools > CheckMedia.
7. Select Delete unused

This also might take a minute depending on how much media came from your new deck. But this pretty much goes into your anki's media folder and deletes all the media not used on a card. Since I end up deleting a lot of cards that only contain words I already know, this really helps clear up space and make sync times faster. 

Also I agree about Ankidroid lol. Good luck!! 

[shenfu]

want to revive this thread to talk about my very positive experience using this resource.

I've used it for a couple of years now but I feel I've got my method down pat the last 6 months of daily use. I'm about HSK 4/5 level and use this as a daily study habit in addition to other study.

I do two types of cards which focus on listening reading and typing. I created a new card type for typed answer cards with audio only on the front. This tests my listening and typing ability. I sort of need to know the characters enough to type them and over time it makes me more familiar with characters. It's better than straight listening I find because it forces you to actively engage and you get immediate concrete feedback on whether you got the card right or not.

The other cards I do are characters only on the front with the audio on the back. The English translations are always hidden by default and I have to manually unmask them.

I suspended the English > Chinese cards. I don't think they're helpful personally.

I am slowly slowly working through the cards in order and it gives me multiple passes because of the spaced repetition and studying them in two ways.

Additionally I use it as a resource for "sentence mining". When I find new vocab I want to learn I search the deck for the word and then flag those particular cards to study at a higher priority using a filtered deck.

Occasionally but infrequently there's a word or grammar structure I want to learn which isn't in Spoonfed. In this case I go to https://tatoeba.org/en/, find an example sentence with the word I want, and make my own sentence based card for it using a text to audio generator online (such as https://ttsmp3.com/text-to-speech/Chinese%20Mandarin/).

I definitely recommend checking out tatoeba as well for anyone interested in finding a wealth of example sentences to help study.