《活着》Anki Vocab Decks + Reading Companion

[markhavemann]

TLDR: Read 活着 in Anki (or on paper) while learning the vocabulary that goes with each chapter, roughly according to your level. If you're interested, you should read at least the "How it works" section below.

 

Download link for all decks here

 

Background

 

Spoiler

This is a project that I've been working on for some time, it's linked to another post I did some time ago about reading 《三体》in Anki. I had some ideas to work vocabulary in and some people also suggested similar things so here it is. I decided to start with 《活着》since it's shorter and easier than 《三体》, which makes it better for testing but possibly also have a wider appeal.

 

I've got some other books in the works but if you have requests just let me know and I'll see what I can do.

 

How it works

 

Spoiler

Visit the Google Drive folder 

 

1. In the "⚡ Vocabulary Decks" folder, choose the appropriate level deck for yourself.
   • Right now it's probably better to NOT choose a deck that includes non-HSK vocabulary since there's quite a lot of unnecessary stuff, but I hope to improve this in the future.
2. In the "? Reading Decks" folder, choose the book deck you want
   • This will determine which vocabulary is glossed (the meaning is displayed for you) on each card while you read
   • For the reading deck, it's fine to include non-HSK vocabulary too, since that's often the words that you are least likely to know and will want to be able to look up while you read.
3. Learn vocab for the first chapter, read the first chapter, learn vocab for the second chapter, read the second chapter, repeat.

 

Example (with images)

 

Here I've chosen the HSK 5-7 (7 = HSK advanced) vocabulary deck, and for reading along I've also chosen HSK 5-7 but this time including non-HSK vocab. This means that when I'm reading I will see word defintions for HSK 5-7 words, but also for words that aren't in any HSK list.

 

 

Vocabulary Cards:

 

 

Top left: Progress through vocabulary in the current chapter (here it's chapter 1), and below: progress through vocabulary of the entire book

Top right: Word info, including HSK Level, FIRST chapter in which that word occurs, and how many times it occurs in the entire book.

Bottom: A list of all the chapters in which this word appears

 

• Many cards have audio. If they do, pinyin is hidden to reduce reliance on pinyin, and learn to trust your ears more. It can be shown by clicking the "pinyin" button.
• Each word has a meaning card and a pronunciation card so that they can be studied separately. If you want just one card per word, go into the card types manager, edit the card template and use the drop down menu at the top to select and remove the second pronunciation card

 

Book Cards:

 

 

Top left: Current chapter (to know which vocabulary to study)

Top right: progress through entire book

Main card content: 

• Previous line: slightly grey, you can see the previous line you just read to make moving between cards less jarring
• Current line: glossed words are highlighted with their meanings shown below. HSK levels are also shown above words
• Next line: also to make it less jarring when you move to the next card

Bottom: Glossed words. The words that are glossed will be determined by which deck you download

 

• Each card has only one side, so pressing "good" just goes straight to the next card, not to the back side.

 

Vocabulary Stats for 《活着》

 

See the second post in this thread for stats.

 

Notes & Bugs

 

Spoiler

• If you come across any bugs, or even any cards that you think can be improved, please post and let me know, I will try fix them and do a v2 at some point with improvements based on feedback.

 

• Much of the non-HKS vocabulary is simple stuff that just simply isn't included in the HSK lists, eg 看看. I hope to make my own "HSK equivalent" lists to prevent certain easy vocabulary from being glossed on decks past a certain level. ie. 看看 is probably HSK 2 level, so any deck that doesn't include HSK 2 vocab should also not include 看看 in the non-HSK vocab either. Update: ✔️ Done
• I'm working on improving the word splitting in the books to get better vocab extraction, as well as do a better job of proper names, and also to include proper names with audio in the vocabulary cards and glossed words.

 

Support & Donations

Spoiler

If you'd like to support this project in any way, feel free to contact me.

 

[markhavemann]

I've added some better vocabulary stats for the book, and split it up into unique words and total words. I also added some graphs to give a more visual idea of how the vocabulary is distributed, to give some idea of the ease.

 

Total unique words: 4077      Non HSK: 1689      HSK 1: 356 (+8)      HSK 2: 352 (+18)      HSK 3: 278 (+18)      HSK 4: 246 (+14)      HSK 5: 242 (+14)      HSK 6: 215 (+17)      HSK 7-9: 603 (+6)

Total words: 58482      Non HSK: 7647      HSK 1: 33425 (+176)      HSK 2: 6249 (+309)      HSK 3: 3182 (+122)      HSK 4: 1799 (+108)      HSK 5: 1557 (+71)      HSK 6: 1130 (+77)      HSK 7-9: 2513 (+20)

 

*** Note: numbers in brackets are HSK equivalent, for example  那 and 个 are both HSK 1, so when 那个 occurs as a word of it’s own, it’s counted as HSK 1 to reduce unnecessarily easy non-HSK words when studying decks that exclude HSK 1, and also give a better idea of difficulty. So HSK 1: 356 (+8) means 356 offical HSK 1 vocab words, plus 8 words like 那个 that are at HSK 1 level

[markhavemann]

Thanks to @7800 for pointing out the mistakes in my statistics. I've updated the main post and will update the post above this too.

[7800]

On 8/28/2023 at 1:27 AM, markhavemann said:

Thanks to @7800 for pointing out the mistakes in my statistics. I've updated the main post and will update the post above this too.

It's always a pleasure to contribute to data accuracy