My Chinese study journey and progress

[abcdefg]

On 12/1/2024 at 7:39 AM, Hijinks said:

the masses (read: me) demand an update!

 

I am trying my best to resist the urge to make some sort of imprudent comment about the perils of trying to learn 100 new words a day. 

[williamwu123]

Hi Hijinks / guys - November update below!

 

Progress

• Rough time split over last month: Anki vocab: 80%, reading: 10%, movies: 10% (this is just an estimate since I don't properly track reading / movie time)
• Vocab progress:
  • Punched out approx. ~1,000 reviews per day on average in the last month
  • I've finished all HSK1-9 vocab plus ~1,000 other words from external sources
  • Total words known: ~11,000 (HSK 1-9 plus ~1,000 others); total characters: ~3,400
  • Now moving the final remnents of the vocab into "mature" but >80% is now mature
  • Also spending some time on a ~3,500 character deck which I should be finalised soon

Positives

• My large focus on vocab learning so far has been quite successful in the sense of "learning unknown words"
• Reading has become easier given the significant drop in unknown characters. There are very few characters that I don't know and most unknown words I can guess given I know the characters
• Reading speed has improved slightly but still not enough for easy movie subtitle watching

Negatives / things to improve for December

• Reading:
  • I was travelling this month so I did not spend as much time on reading as I would have liked this month (maybe only like 8 hours on reading this month)
  • Reading continues to be draining and I have not found source material yet that is interesting enough to stick to the end
• Speaking:
  • No improvement in speaking or usage of vocab yet. I need to spend more time on listening and speaking
  • Furthermore, I have not seen any passive improvement in speaking or usage of vocab from (my admittedly limited) reading. I have read a few posts about passive improvements via full input immersion on reading but I'm unclear yet if speaking improvements is more easily achieved via passive immersion vs active memorising an Anki speaking deck (i.e., show an English sentence and I need to come up with the Chinese sentence)
• Listening:
  • I would like to spend more time on this but have not found a good set up for this because of the following:
    • Movies - LanguageReactor only works in Netflix but most good Chinese movies are on domestic channels like Youku. If I don't have LanguageReactor I have to pause every so other and manually look up. Again, probably need to spend more time here
    • Podcasts - Haven't found a good source of podcasts yet with subtitles - this I think would help immensely with listening improvements

 

[williamwu123]

On 12/2/2024 at 2:36 AM, abcdefg said:

I am trying my best to resist the urge to make some sort of imprudent comment about the perils of trying to learn 100 new words a day. 

I think based on my experience I have found it possible and feasible.

 

At beginning of September -> where I am now 3 months later in December

• Words: 2,500 -> ~11,000
• Characters: 1,200 -> ~3,400

Here are my thoughts based on my experience doing this in the last 3 months or so where I went from a HSK5 level to HSK9+ level

• It is definitely possible if we are just talking about basic memorisation of the words (i.e., cannot actively use the word but just memorising the pinyin / sound)
• I have not found a negative impact on learning vs doing a much smaller amount over a longer period - my sense is my retention stats are pretty similar (approx ~90%)
• Words actually become quite easy to memorise given they are form from character stems (to be honest, it's really the characters you need to memorise) - the HSK7-9 vocab list was very easy in this sense and I got it all done in just over a month
• If I could redo it again, I'd probably spend more time on the individual characters rather than going by the HSK7-9 wordlists given:
  • There is only a upper limit of 3,500-4,000 characters that a native speaker knows vs 40,000 words 
  • Most words / chengyu you can guess or infer the meaning if you know the characters
  • Memorising words sometimes lead to character confusion between similar characters and takes longer to "recognise" the character if the character shows up in a different word combination. I think similar to how if you do sentence flashcards you memorise the sentence as opposed to individual words. This hinders reading
• Personally, I have not found a strong benefit to retention or learning time from learning a "random word off the HSK list" vs mining the word off source material that I read. There is some benefit in the sense that I had already seen the word in some context but I didn't find it substantially easier than seeing the word 2-3 times in Anki 

[lordsuso]

wow @williamwu123 that's very impressive 😮 keep it up!

 

On 12/2/2024 at 4:37 PM, williamwu123 said:

I have to pause every so other and manually look up

Here is a piece of advice from my experience: embrace the limitations of each type of media and don't get caught up in the technologies, so go ahead and listen to podcasts without subtitles and watch videos with hard subtitles. Not everything has to be about vocabulary, you need to develop other skills too (reading speed, listening speed, inferring unknown words from context, etc). For that reason I also recommend reading comics, because it is a pain to look up words so you'll do it less often and have fewer interruptions.

[abcdefg]

Well done. Bravo!

 

On 12/2/2024 at 9:51 AM, williamwu123 said:

Personally, I have not found a strong benefit to retention or learning time from learning a "random word off the HSK list" vs mining the word off source material that I read.

 

I found that too. Agree 100%. "Mining" was also easier for me to continue day after day and week after week in that it seemed more relevant to daily life. Admittedly, our goals were different.