Reflections on online learning

[mungouk]

I recently completed 300 lessons on italki.com with my Chinese teacher, and it's been suggested that I write something up. 

 

I'll try to focus on lessons learned, as in: things I would do differently if starting again.

 

 

Background

 

When I started learning Chinese in Feb 2017 it was more or less from zero. I knew nihao and xiexie, and I could recognise a few Hanzi thanks to the beginner's level Japanese I've done twice in F2F evening classes. That was it.

 

My motivation for learning was partly because I was living in Singapore at the time (and therefore seeing Chinese written on signs everywhere, so I was curious), and partly because I love learning languages, and Chinese to me always seemed like one of the great challenges to have a go at.  I also had a vague idea about moving to China to work for a while, like many of us I guess.

 

I knew I wanted to learn 1:1 online rather than having F2F classes, because I really enjoy the flexibility. I studied Hindi with a teacher on Skype when I lived in India and that had worked really well. I'd also done plenty of evening classes over the years and been dissatisfied with the rigidity of once-a-week, 10 weeks in a semester, and having to travel to a school somewhere to study after a tiring day at work.

 

With 1:1 classes I appreciate being able to dictate my own pace, and with online I like the flexibility of being able to move classes around, re-scheduling to suit my situation when necessary. italki.com is useful like this as it basically acts a scheduling system for your lessons. I always keep going with classes even when I'm travelling or on holiday, so long as I have a decent Internet connection.

 

 

Getting Started

 

I went to italki.com, found a teacher with 5-star reviews and good qualifications, and we had a 30-minute trial lesson. It went very well, so we started having one-hour lessons once a week using Zoom or Skype... we've switched back and forth for various technical reasons over the years (and even used WeChat once I think although it doesn't support screen sharing).

 

I like my teacher a lot — we're still together after more than 3 years — but in retrospect once a week wasn't enough to begin with, particularly in retaining vocabulary.  We studied using pinyin and I made steady but slow progress for the first 6 months, using the Integrated Chinese textbooks to start with.  (I was working a full-time job at this point btw.)

 

After 6 months we decided it was time to move onto Hanzi, and shortly after that — around September — I decided to go for the December HSK 2 exam as a short-term objective. So we switched from the Integrated Chinese series to the HSK 2 Standard Course textbook and workbook, and eventually to the HSK 2 practice exams in the 3-4 weeks before the actual exam.

 

 

HSK and HSKK

 

I did the paper-based version of the HSK 2 exam in Singapore in Dec 2017. Sitting in a classroom surrounded by 10-year old schoolkids was a bit weird!  My thinking was that going for Level 2 first would give me experience of the exam format, and something to aim for that wasn't too daunting. I scored 92% for listening and 99% for reading. 

 

Round about then I discovered these forums and started getting more motivated and more excited about what might lie ahead. ?

 

I had lesson #65 a year to the day since I started, so that was an average of 1.25 per week in the first year, and by this point we'd done 5 lessons in the HSK 3 textbook out of a total of 20. We switched up a gear and I began having lessons 2-3 times a week, and conscientiously doing homework, both of which I found made a lot of difference with retention of material. 

 

My teacher is fond of this quote, which seems very apt:

 

    学如逆水行舟，不进则退。

    Learning is like rowing upstream; not to advance is to drop back.

 

We finished the HSK 3 textbook in June 2018 and then moved onto exam preparation for HSK 3 and HSKK 初级 beginner level. I registered to do both the exams in Shanghai in July as part of a holiday in China — my first visit.  (If ever you want to ruin the first few days of your holiday, just try spending them sitting in a hotel room doing mock exams!)

This was also my first experience of doing the HSK on computer rather than the paper test, and I found it harder and slower to read the Hanzi as they were pretty low-resolution in a poor quality font. I wrote up the experience in detail on this thread: HSK 3 "internet-based test" — report.

 

In the end my HSK 3 score was Listening: 88, Reading: 74, Writing: 92, total 254 (pass mark is 180, 60%). On reflection, I wish I had spent more time preparing for the reading section, because you have to be able to read very quickly, and it’s useful to have some tactics for answering certain kinds of questions, such as skimming the ones that are asking you “in general, what is this text about?”. For example I could have done more mock tests, but just the reading section against a timer.

 

The HSKK beginner level exam was pretty painless and in fact I was the only person in the room, so it was very relaxed. I scored 78/100 (the pass mark is 60).

 

Next we started the HSK 4 textbooks (two volumes) and I plodded along with those; meanwhile I also registered for the HSKK 中极 intermediate exam in Singapore in Dec 2018. We did some oral preparation for that in lessons in the weeks before. In the end this exam was a bit of a disaster, mainly due to the very noisy set-up in the room (as I described in another post) and I could barely hear what was going on. I only scored 53/100 for this (the pass mark again is 60).

 

I left Singapore in Dec 2018, and 2019 was meant to be a "gap year" although it didn't really turn out that way. I continued with my online lessons though, apart from a 4-week break when I studied CELTA intensively. From May to December I ended up in Beijing teaching English to Chinese schoolkids, and obviously living in China for the first time made a big difference to my studies. Certainly by the time I was about to leave Beijing in December 2019 I felt like something was starting to "click" in terms of listening because I was just hearing Mandarin spoken a lot of the time, including from Chinese work colleagues and students.

 

In April 2020 we finished the second HSK 4 textbook (4下) shortly after completing 300 lessons, after around 3 years and 2 months in total, and originally the aim would then have been to move into exam preparation mode. But meanwhile most of the world had become locked-down due to COVID-19 and exams were cancelled. So in the interim we've recently shifted to working on listening and speaking again, using photos as stimulus material and some bits of HSKK 中级 tests.  So far this year we'd been doing 2 lessons a week as I was trying to save money, but I'm going to move it back up to 3 per week again now.

 

I'd like to do the HSK 4 exam this year (2020) but this will probably be in China and I've no idea when I'll finally get back there.

 

 

Lesson Formats

 

Generally we follow a lesson format set by the teacher, although whenever there's something specific I want to work on, like revising certain aspects of grammar or pronunciation we'll switch to those for a while.  My teacher always gives a full 60 minute lesson — no mean feat if you have back-to-back classes.

 

We usually begin each lesson with a 5-10 minute chat about what I've been doing since the last lesson, talking about the weather or current affairs etc. I know some folk really don't like this, but I find it a good warm-up exercise... apart from anything else, I usually prepare some vocab for it which is useful since it's usually non-HSK vocab but directly relevant to my everyday life, so it fills a certain gap.

 

After the chat we move onto the textbook or workbook. 

 

Mostly we've been working through the HSK Standard Course textbooks chapter by chapter, and each chapter has a set structure:

• Some new words and discussion of topic area for the chapter
• Dialogues and texts, with new words at the side
• Grammar points, examples and exercises

 

For the dialogues and texts we'll go through the new words and then I'll try to read the text out loud. Typically then I'll read again but with the teacher reading first and me repeating, so we can focus on tones and sentence structure. Then my teacher will ask me a few questions to test comprehension, often leading into a broader discussion, asking my opinions etc., followed by some discussion of main grammar points. Finally we'll discuss any problems or questions I might have.

 

For the grammar and exercises we'll work through the material together, skipping some stuff that's meant to be group-work.

 

I've been pretty happy with this approach... it's good to have a structure to work with and I like the way that the new vocabulary is introduced in chunks in each chapter. 

 

We've also used the HSK Standard Course workbooks, in a fairly ad hoc way for HSK 3 but by HSK 4 we had settled on a pretty solid routine whereby after finishing each chapter in the textbook we would do the corresponding reading and writing exercises in the workbook. These are like cut-down versions of the HSK exam, but only using the vocab that has been introduced up to that point, chapter by chapter, so I've found they work very well.  

 

At HSK 3 level we did some of the listening exercises from the workbook, with the teacher reading out the text, but we didn't bother doing this for HSK 4... since the workbook comes with audio I can do this on my own when I finally start to prepare for the HSK 4 exam.

 

The other lesson formats we've had have been preparation for the HSK or HSKK exam, which in the earlier days was going through the mock papers, but I soon moved onto doing these against the clock in my own time, and then making a note of any problems so we could discuss them in the next class.

 

 

Tools and Resources

 

I've found that the tools and resources I've used have changed over time. 

 

When I first started to learn Hanzi I began using the Skritter app and was focused on trying to learn radicals.  I don't know how or where I came across this recommendation ("learn radicals first"), but in the end I decided it was pointless, especially learning their names. For me it was more important to be learning words. I ended up with a little poster stuck up in the kitchen with radicals and variants on it, and rather than trying to "learn" them I found it more useful just to browse this from time to time, while cooking for example, and to go and look at it when I noticed a certain radical was cropping up.

 

Actually I think what made a lot more difference to me was thinking about components and how phonetic-semantic characters work.  If I'm working on a laptop I often use MDBG.net or HanziCraft to look up a new character and break it down into components to help me understand what's going on, and to see if there's a pronunciation "clue" in there.  I also use the ZhongWen pop-up dictionary extension for Chrome all the time, and that hooks very nicely into MDBG and Chinese Grammar Wiki.

 

I liked Skritter — the method for learning tones is interesting — but I found that when using this app it was just taking me too long to learn the HSK vocabulary for the level I was at.  Plus, my attitude to handwriting has always been that it's not essential and that I will come to it eventually. So in the end I cancelled my subscription.

 

When I was working towards HSK 3 I was using memrise.com a lot, via the browser on my laptop rather than the app.  I built my own multi-level deck for studying the vocab, organised in the order they're presented in the textbook, testing by audio. I built my own because there's one for HSK 2 which I had found useful. What eventually turned me off memrise is that it was full of mistakes and missing audio, one of the downsides of user-generated content.  Plus I moved more to using apps on my phone for learning on the go, and I didn't like the memrise app.  (Memrise seems to have changed a lot since then.)

 

Eventually I moved onto using the StickyStudy app for vocab, and I hacked my own decks (available here) so I had one for each chapter in the HSK 4 textbooks. Again I found it better to break things down a bit — a single deck with 600 cards in it is harder to manage.

 

Recently I was curious about Tofulearn after hearing good things here so I started using that as well, including using it briefly to go back to learning handwriting for HSK1 level, "for fun".

 

Currently I'm mainly using Tofulearn on my iPad, drilling the HSK 4 vocab... it doesn't work well on my iPhone as I have the text set to be quite large (accessibility settings) and it doesn't fit on the screen properly. But on the iPad it just seems to hit the sweet spot for me. I hadn't really dug into it much until recently, but it also allows you to drill down into components, similar characters and so on.  Since I've now finished the textbooks and covered all the vocab, the order of presentation doesn't matter any more — but in Tofulearn the 600 word deck is broken down into sets of 50 cards, so you can practice a smaller subset if you want.

 

One thing I've found really useful and important with all these tools is being able to hear native-speaker audio (not synthesised text-to-speech) when I'm learning the Hanzi... this has helped me a lot with recalling tones, to the extent that I can subvocalise or "hear in my mind's ear" what many of these words sound like in the recordings.

 

Of course there's also an enormous amount of content out there even just on youtube. I enjoyed watching the free ChinesePod videos from the "Fiona and Constance era" — I really liked the way they presented the Qing Wen series, especially when I was starting out and I needed some solid explanations of things like the differences between 的 - 得 - 地.

 

I also found the XM Mandarin youtube channel to have a lot of useful videos relating to understanding and preparing for HSK and HSKK exams.  Xiao Min's voice is very clear and well-recorded... I used some of her vocabulary playlists when I needed to revise but wanted a change or was feeling tired. 

 

Alan Davies @hskalan did some great analysis and clustering of HSK vocab along with visualisations at hskhsk.com which I've had fun with... things get a bit unwieldy at HSK 4 but looking at the common characters in HSK1-3 is really interesting and helped me consolidate my understanding quite a bit. I've tried creating my own visualisations using Gephi and the source files which is interesting but a but tricky. 

 

Finally of course there's Pleco, which I use every day. I've tried using the flashcards feature for revision but found it a bit basic compared to StickyStudy. Apart from that it's one of the best apps I've ever used for anything. 

 

Graded readers is one area I've not managed to get into properly yet... I read The Monkey's Paw last year and the story was a bit simplistic, but it's nice to be able to read an actual book. I have a graded reader sitting on Pleco too which I've not started yet (Legend of the White Snake), and again on the iPad it seems like it hits the sweet spot in terms of presentation and function, although I do find the mix of hyperlinks and underlined text too cluttered... it would be nice to be able to turn this off.

 

 

Well that was a couple of hours of brain-dump on a Saturday lunchtime. I hope it's useful to someone. 

 

 

Edit: My teacher and I recently decided on a book we can use next to help me consolidate grammar and improve speaking/listening, given that HSK exams have been suspended during the C-19 lockdown.  See this other thread. 

 

[Singe]

Well, I have to say, this is one of the best posts I've read on here. There is a such a wealth of information and you've even taken the time to add the links. I've already had a look at some of the links and come across some stuff I never knew about. For anyone looking for tips in the future, this has to be one of the 'go-to' posts they should start with.

 

Thanks heaps @mungouk for taking the time and effort, though I might end up with more questions as I process the post. Well done buddy, a real gem of a post.

[mungouk]

Thank you @Singe, but there really is a wealth of information already here, from folks who've gone way deeper than I probably ever will, since 2003.

 

All that any of us can do is give a small snapshot of our own experience.

 

Explore and enjoy!

 

[Tomsima]

Fantastic write up! Out of curiosity, am I right in thinking you've essentially taken the no-srs route? I was surprised to not see anki in there at all, as it seems like an essential for most language learners these days (although you do see more and more 'natural srs' advice popping up nowadays). Any reason you didn't venture this route?

[ChTTay]

3 hours ago, Tomsima said:

essentially taken the no-srs route?

Aren’t sticky study flashcards SRS? Also mentions using Pleco flashcards (that are SRS if you buy them). 

[mungouk]

Well yes... StickyStudy, TofuLearn, Pleco Flashcards, Memrise and Skritter all use SRS.

 

If the question were "Why not Anki?", then my answer would be that I didn't like it. 

 

This is based on my possibly-outdated experience back in 2012-2014 when I was using it for learning Hindi vocab. I think I also made some Japanese decks at some point... probably 2015.

 

I've used both AnkiDroid and Anki for iOS (AnkiMobile?  The paid-for app anyway) and the desktop app, and thought that the decks looked awful. Plus the amount of fiddling around "under the hood" with CSS to get things to look how you want just wasn't worth the trouble.

 

Maybe things are different these days... I notice now that I did download the Mac desktop app onto this new macbook which I've only had since November, so I'm open to trying out some "good" decks if anyone has exemplars that might change my mind!

 

But for standard HSK vocab lists with text + audio I think StickyStudy and Tofulearn do a very good job.

[Dawei3]

 

On 5/9/2020 at 9:49 AM, mungouk said:

学如逆水行舟，不进则退。

    Learning is like rowing upstream; not to advance is to drop back.

I love this phrase.  Because I don't live in China (i.e., a Chinese speaking environment, I feel like this all-the-time, i.e., I'm constantly learning new things and forgetting old things. 

 

As others have pointed out, it's an excellent post.  In addition to thanking you, by commenting on it, I'll be able to find it more easily in the future as well (for later reference).

 

I wonder if learning Hindi or other languages helped with your Chinese learning.  After I was well into learning Chinese, I learned some Dutch & small amounts of a few other languages.  I felt that learning Chinese had trained my ears to listen more carefully for word emphasis & intonation in other languages and this helped me speak them more naturally.  It also taught my mouth to make new sounds.  As a result, I became better at learning other languages as well.  Both Dutch & Filipino colleagues noted I didn't have an "American accent" when I spoke their languages (my ability in both is/was quite limited).  Although no one ever said it, when previously I learned German in school (i.e., before learning Chinese), I likely spoke it with an American accent.  

 

 

[mungouk]

I think that every time you start to learn a new language, any others you have studied before will help you to some degree.

 

Apart from developing language-learning strategies along the way, I think some big changes feel as though they require some significant "re-wiring" of the brain. For example, moving from (say) English or French to German, you have to get used to putting the verb at the end of the sentence, which feels quite peculiar at the time. But eventually you get used to it. So later on when you come to other SOV languages like Japanese and Hindi, you've already dealt with that obstacle.

 

I've always wanted to learn Dutch; I love the sounds and the way it sounds like English at times, but just out of reach of comprehension. After spending a summer in Berlin on intensive German studies I was pleasantly surprised to find I could read some Dutch (very similar grammar to German and a lot of similar words), but pronunciation is another story!

 

 

 

 

[Zeppa]

Thanks very much for this. I must start learning Chinese again!

[mungouk]

On 5/10/2020 at 12:07 PM, mungouk said:

I'm open to trying out some "good" [Anki] decks if anyone has exemplars that might change my mind!

 

OK, this is looking quite useful: Chinese Grammar (汉语 语法) HSK4. I like the way the questions involve re-arranging the words, which is similar to part of the HSK exam.

 

One thing I've realised recently is that I've been putting all my revision effort into vocabulary, and not doing the same for grammar points.  Some more decks like this would be good. 

 

 

[Flickserve]

7 hours ago, mungouk said:

OK, this is looking quite useful: Chinese Grammar (汉语 语法) HSK4. I like the way the questions involve re-arranging the words, which is similar to part of the HSK exam.

 

Good find.

 

I tried it on my Android smart phone with ankidroid. The characters didn't show up. Must be something about the formatting.

 

Will have a look on my PC

[mungouk]

I've been using the HSK3 and HSK4 decks... it appears they all use example sentences scraped from Chinese Grammar Wiki, but without taking the pinyin too, which instead has been generated by software.  I've spotted quite a few errors in the pinyin so far, but I'm not really looking at it anyway.

 

Quote

The content is taken from Chinese Grammar Wiki. The pinyin is generated using pinyin python module. The translation of this sentences translated using googletrans python module. The audio for all sentences generated using gTTS python module.