My Chinese Study Routine Summer 2020

I recently wrote about my new and shiny French study routine. Let’s move on to the Chinese one!

I’ve changed up my Chinese study routine a bit since I last wrote about it.

Image by Meng Tian, licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0

For the last couple of months I’ve started to get the feeling that I wasn’t really progressing as fast with Chinese as I’d been hoping.

I’ve had the nagging sensation that this might be because of my decision to focus more on native materials than actual studies. This was pretty effective at the beginning when I was still learning all the super common words, but now it feels like the I’m mostly just picking out the same old words I always do.

It also just takes a lot of time, and was starting to feel like a chore. And my approach to to studying is that when I start feeling that it’s difficult to muster up the energy to do something, it’s time to replace it!

I’ve also recently had a major rethink of how I approach incorporating native materials into my studies in general. Basically coming to the conclusion that for the most part, I’ll do it for pleasure and not as part of my routine.

So… with all that in mind I’ve decided to step up my time spent doing Anki and well… only do other things in Chinese if I feel like it. This Anki routine has in my experience been the most learning per spent minute at any rate.

There are two basic parts of to it and it’s still very similar to the one I showed off in this video:

50 Hanzi Anki Cards

I’ve got one deck that’s the Chinese hanzi characters. Each of those have one card for meaning and another for pronunciation. I only test myself somewhat loosely on the latter being pretty lenient with the tones so far. I might be stricter once I can pick those out better.

I also do five cards each day where I only pick out the tone (i.e. rising, falling, flat or falling then rising).

50 Vocabulary Listening Anki Cards

My second type is for words. It has a spoken word with pinyin, but no hanzi on the front, and full information as well as a spoken sample sentence on the back.

I add words that contain characters that I’ve learned in the hanzi deck mentioned above. And it’s also sorted using the Morphman add-on so I only get sample sentences that contain words I already know.

Overengineering My Studies For Fun and Sometimes Profit

My thinking is that this way I’ll focus on the words that are the most likely to actually stick in my brain, and also be useful:

I learn words a lot easier when I hear them in a sentence, especially if I hear the same sentence repeatedly so that it becomes an ear worm of sorts.

I also find the words easier to remember when I know what sounds can mean which characters (and thereby concepts). It also helps that a not insignificant amount of these words exist with the same characters in Japanese as well.

So in order to facilitate this I need to do some extra work every day. Apart from MorphMan itself I’ve written a few scripts that allow me to find five new Hanzi to learn that will let me learn the most new words as well as unlock only cards that teach words with hanzi I’ve studied.

So yeah, that’s what I’ll try for the time being.