How to Grow and Review Larger Vocabulary Lists

[SteadyCamel]

I see in some discussions that people are able to add five, 10, or even 15 words a day to their vocabulary, which astounds me.  What is your basic routine for reviewing these?  How often do you review each word and how much time per day do you spend?  I gather from comments that you're not spending a lot of time reviewing flashcards? I almost wonder if you're just making a list and kind of learning new words for the moment?

 

I've taken a more intensive learning approach to date and have assembled ~2,000 flashcards but I'm coming to realize I will need to change strategies as I'm now spending ~45 minutes a day on flashcards.  One possibility is to just flood my current deck with new words and limit my review time and see what happens.  Regardless, I expect people will be familiar with my problem.  How do I actually review (or not) a larger flashcard deck?  If it makes a difference, I am currently splitting my time about 40 / 40 / 20 on reading / listening / grammar.
 

[wibr]

I keep all my words in Pleco lists and only enable those which are currently relevant to me, e.g. for a TV series I am watching or for a book I am reading. Once I am done with this book or TV series I still study the words for a while to make sure that almost all of them ended up in the long term memory and then disable the category, so unless those words are also on other active lists they will no longer appear in the flashcards I am studying.

[dakonglong]

Good question!

 

My process has changed quite a bit over the years, but here is the one that I finally settled on and it seems to work for me.

 

I created five lists in Pleco: (1) unstudied, (2) batch, (3) studying, (4) studied, (5) inactive.

 

Unstudied holds all of the words I want to learn in the short/medium term. Initially, these were all HSK words, but once I started reading, they were vocabulary words I found in books. I personally find it much easier to take the words from books because I can often relate them back to the context from the book, which helps me remember them. I have about 1,000 words in my unstudied deck currently.

 

1. Every day I add fifteen words from unstudied to batch. I learn these words sequentially (can I remember the first word? OK, move onto the second word. Can I remember the first two words? OK, move onto the third word, etc… until I have learned all fifteen reasonably well. This takes about 10 minutes.
2. Next, I quiz myself on the fifteen new words in batch three times in a row. After the third repetition I move them from batch to studying. This takes about five minutes.
3. Next, I quiz myself on everything in studying, not just what is due. This group includes cards from the past week or so. Once my studying deck hits 90 cards, I transfer the whole thing to studied. So, on any given day my studying deck has between 15 and 90 cards in it. This takes about 10 minutes.
4. Next, I quiz myself on only the assigned cards in my studied deck. This is usually around 100 cards. Once my studied deck hits 990 cards, I move them to the inactive deck. I like to keep the learned cards in inactive in case I want to go back and reference them one day, but once they’re moved there, I stop actively reviewing them. This takes about 10 minutes.
5. I receive all of my other repetition from books. If a card has dropped out of my studied deck but not appeared in the book I’m reading, I won’t see it again. This is OK for me because it indicates that the word is not that important or frequently used. Prior to when I started reading, I never cleared out my studied deck (I had no other way to keep the words in long-term memory except by constantly reviewing the flashcards). It reached about 5,000 cards before I finally cleared it out. I still have nightmares about the times I left it un-reviewed for a week and came back too 1,000+ reviews for one day. In my opinion, reading is a much better option to keep relevant words in your long-term memory vs using a huge Pleco deck.

 

Also, two notes.

 

One: I add every new word I encounter in my current book to my unstudied deck, but I curate what goes into each batch. I may review 50+ words in the unstudied deck to choose the 15 words I will review for the day. This allows me to be selective about which words I learn first, and which I’m interested in on a particular day. If I delete something from unstudied deck and it shows up there again a few days later because I have encountered it in my book again, I will be more likely to assign it to the batch the next time around.

 

Two: I have found it MUCH easier to learn new words now that I have a larger vocabulary because many new words are just combinations of two characters I already know. This means that vocabulary acquisition has actually gotten faster for me as my vocabulary has expanded. I assume this trend will only continue as there are a limited number of characters in the language.

 

Hope this helps!

[黄有光]

@SteadyCamel Here's what I do for my study routine. I know it's not for everyone, but it works wonders for me. I study vocabulary using books. I do one chapter at a time, and I use Chinese Text Analyzer to identify all of the words in the chapter I need to study, and I make flashcards for all of them. On average I would say I spend less than one second on each flashcard when reviewing, and in this manner I add 30 words to my vocabulary every day (which later get reinforced as I read the book).

 

This study routine does come at a significant cost!

• I often don't fully understand how to use these words in a sentence.
• In the case of synonyms, I rarely feel like I have a strong grasp on the subtleties of what distinguishes one word from its synonyms
• The nature of my study routine builds passive, but not active vocabulary. So although I'll understand them in context, for most of these words I won't be able to recall them on my own.

In my case, I decided that the pros (dramatically increasing the size of my passive vocabulary) greatly outweighed the cons listed above. I decided this because, at the time I started, my entire vocabulary, including passive vocabulary, was estimated at ~5000, and so my ability to function in Chinese was extraordinarily restricted and consuming any kind of native media, be it books, web articles, documentaries, or whatever, was basically impossible for me. So the idea was to expand my vocabulary as quickly as possible to a number which would allow me to comfortably read novels and hopefully also watch internet videos. The hope is that, once I achieve the ability to regularly consume Chinese media, vocabulary will slowly start to flow from my passive vocabulary into my active vocabulary through no explicit effort on my part, and the kinds of knowledge that I outlined above will also naturally fill in on its own.

 

I practice very aggressive flashcard hygiene, in that I delete my deck and start over with a new one once every book or so (that's about two months) -- or by another measure, once the deck reaches approximately 4000 cards. I figure the important stuff will get reinforced through reading. I do forget stuff and have to add it back into my decks relatively frequently, but almost always the second time around is extremely painless, less like learning and more like a soft reminder. If you were wondering about the structure of my cards, I build them like this:

 

Front: Chinese term + audio

Back: (in order of desirability)

• Nearest Chinese synonym(s)
• Nearest English synonym(s)
• Short explanation in Chinese
• Short explanation in English
• Image

 

[Woodford]

I have memorized the HSK 6 list of 5000 words, plus about 15,000 that I've harvested out of different books. I actually spend around 45 minutes a day on flashcards. For me, there's been no shortcut--it's been a lot of repetitive work. Eventually, because I'm adding less and less new words, and my SRS flashcards are getting more and more spaced out, my routine could one day easily shrink down to about 15 minutes, rather than 45. That will be really gratifying. I do think I've caused more work for myself than necessary, though. The Pleco flashcard app (and the Anki app, I believe) has an "easiness" feature that causes easy cards to be delayed much further out, and harder cards to increase delay more slowly. But I didn't make use of that. The delay of all my cards is doubled when I guess correctly, and halved when I guess wrongly, just the same. Oops! So I probably spend too much time on cards that are securely burned in my memory.

[SteadyCamel]

This is super helpful.  I'm getting some ideas about  how to restructure my process.  A couple follow up questions:

• As an intermediate step in flashcard management, how do people tackle HSK5 / HSK6 vocab lists?
• At what point as a student can I keep words in long-term memory via reading instead of via flashcards?  I'm tempted to try this now, but at this point I'm still averaging just a few sentences of reading per day (HSK4 Chairman's Bao) as I'm also trying to do listening and make some minimal progress on grammar.
   

[dakonglong]

To answer your first question: I just broke up the HSK5 list into groups of 15 words and learned one group per day. I didn't bother with HSK6, just moved onto reading books instead.

 

Per the second question: In my experience, you will need some consistent practice before you can read quickly enough to review words this way, but the only way to get that practice is by reading. My recommendation would be to pick up an easy book and just start reading. It will be painful at first whether you start with a vocabulary of 2,000 words or 5,000 words because the words you need to know depend highly on what you read. I think that the best way to learn the words in the end of a book is to read the beginning, so just know that it will get easier as you go, and some of that ease will even carry over the next book (though probably less than you would expect). I switched to my current study method around the time I had read 1.5 books (小王子 and half of 撒哈拉的故事). At that point I could read 撒哈拉的故事 quickly enough to review new words this way, but just barely. Note that when I moved onto my next book I slowed back down. In this way, reading in Chinese feels to me like climbing a mountain, the mid-way point of the book is the top of the mountain, and after you pass that point it seems (at least to me) to get easier. Then, the next book feels like another mountain, it's just a slightly smaller mountain than the previous one. That's actually one reason why I mostly stick to books instead of articles, a book is long enough where I can feel it become somewhat easier as I read, which I find satisfying. In conclusion, there's no time like the present to get started!

[imron]

On 12/14/2021 at 11:37 AM, SteadyCamel said:

At what point as a student can I keep words in long-term memory via reading instead of via flashcards?

Whenever you like, as longer you are doing sufficient, regular reading, and don't mind adding the occasional card back in to your deck.

 

See this discussion on deleting your decks.

 

It works because you'll either know the word well, in which case it doesn't matter if you remove it from the deck, or you don't know the word well and you can add it back to your deck the next time you encounter it.  You don't need to worry about deleting useful/important words, because by definition, if the words are useful/important they will show up again in your reading and you can add them back then, rather than spending time on words that you might not see again.

 

On 12/13/2021 at 10:59 AM, SteadyCamel said:

I see in some discussions that people are able to add five, 10, or even 15 words a day to their vocabulary, which astounds me.  What is your basic routine for reviewing these?

For me, when I'm in vocabulary learning mode, I'd add 5-10 words a day and then delete everything once it was taking more than 30mins to review.