3 ms·

> Let's do some simple math of how long it's going to take you conservatively to learn the 8105 characters given in the Table of General Standard Chinese Charac

by yorwba 7y ago

> Let's do some simple math of how long it's going to take you conservatively to learn the 8105 characters given in the Table of General Standard Chinese Characters if you follow my velocity of 50 characters a day. And I'm going to add another 30 minutes, so we have 2 whole hours a day. ... > 324.2 hours for all characters in the course of ~6 months. This seems very possible to me and a very good investment of time at that. After these 6 months you'll be free to pursue gaining vocabulary in the form of combining the characters you know into words, pronunciation and listening/speaking. That's treating language learning as batch job, even though pipelining it would probably make more sense. You don't have to first learn all the characters and then all the words and then how to pronounce all the words and then finally you can dare to utter your first sentence. I think it's better to do it the other way around: find a sentence you want to say or understand. Look up all the words in that single sentence, their characters and pronunciations, then memorize only those. Then learn another sentence. That way you always have some context for the new knowledge, instead of just treating it as a random collection of facts. If you frontload on characters, it's easy to overlearn things you don't actually need. I have an Anki deck with 9385 Chinese words and 4174 distinct characters, so I know only slightly more than half of the 8105 characters the author intends to learn. But I'm functionally fluent, since the other characters basically don't appear in modern texts, except for very specific contexts. I picked a random character I didn't recognize from the list: 笸. According to Wiktionary, it's only used in the words 笸箩 and 笸篮, each of which refers to a specific kind of basket. https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E7%AC%B8 https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E7%AC%B8

_hao 7y ago
Actually I don't really intend to go for that list like that. I just wanted to illustrate that time wise it's possible. What I do intend to do is to follow the same approach for the second book and learn the other 1500 characters. I've written in another comment that I've already bought some HSK1-3 graded readers and grammars that I intend to use. Maybe after that I can use the "batch" approach once more for new characters that I encounter. But the initial 3000 I think are really good base for me and my desire to start some simple reading relatively fast. For what is worth I've tried the approach you listed and it didn't really work for me.
- yorwba 7y ago
  1500 characters should be more than enough for HSK-3 level reading. I just checked the vocabulary list for HSK-4 I downloaded in 2017 (but I guess it didn't change much in the meantime) and it contains only 1200 words. So my recommendation for you is to start reading now rather than learning another 1500 characters you won't have much use for until your vocabulary is much more advanced.
  - _hao 7y ago
    Thanks for the advice, I appreciate it. I've taken a small break from studying (just reviews since I finished this experiment). I might follow your advice while still going forward with the second book, but not with the 50 chars/day pace, I'll perhaps tone it down. You're right that HSK1-3 (or even 4 as you suggest) are very trivial in terms of vocabulary.
james_s_tayler 7y ago
I treat language learning as a batch job at the beginning. Works pretty superbly for me. I usually batch pronunciation, then writing system, then grammar, then vocab. All the mean while try to do as much immersion as possible diving into native materials straight away and just enjoy the language in every way you can. There are a lot of different paths through language learning. They all work. But they don't all work for everyone. You just gotta try a bunch of different things and really find which path works for you.
- yorwba 7y ago
  > All the mean while try to do as much immersion as possible diving into native materials straight away and just enjoy the language in every way you can. Then you have already parallelized the process, have you not? > I usually batch pronunciation, then writing system, then grammar, then vocab. How does that ordering work in practice? I can imagine learning to pronounce each individual sound in isolation, and learning to write and pronounce each letter in the writing system before you know any words, but how do you learn about grammar without vocabulary to apply the grammar to? > There are a lot of different paths through language learning. They all work. But they don't all work for everyone. You just gotta try a bunch of different things and really find which path works for you. Agreed.
  - james_s_tayler 7y ago
    Mostly works out fine. There isn't a perfectly strict separation between grammar ant vocab like you imagine. I do it through sentences, so naturally a little vocab is required for that, and that's ok. The goal in the grammar phase is to collect and Anki enough sentences to be able to parse sentences grammatically. I usually need about 3 to 5 sentences for each grammar point. The vocab phase is purely about vocab. Grammar is done at this point. I remember first year of Japanese study was Kanji then grammar. At the end of that first year I knew about 2000 words. The second year was purely vocab. I managed to acquire 10,000 new vocab by the end of the second year. After that point I could understand most spoken and written things with patches here and there. I could hold conversations for hours with a single person. In the 3rd year of study I did much the same. I remember my Anki vocab deck getting up to about 17k words before reviews were at about 300 to 400 a day and the returns were diminishing, so I just deleted the deck. Stopped cold. End of that 3rd year I could read novels pretty well. Hold conversations on any topic for any length of time in group settings. It worked remarkably well. It was damn hard work though.

by yorwba 7y ago

_hao 7y ago

Actually I don't really intend to go for that list like that. I just wanted to illustrate that time wise it's possible. What I do intend to do is to follow the same approach for the second book and learn the other 1500 characters. I've written in another comment that I've already bought some HSK1-3 graded readers and grammars that I intend to use. Maybe after that I can use the "batch" approach once more for new characters that I encounter. But the initial 3000 I think are really good base for me and my desire to start some simple reading relatively fast. For what is worth I've tried the approach you listed and it didn't really work for me.

yorwba 7y ago
1500 characters should be more than enough for HSK-3 level reading. I just checked the vocabulary list for HSK-4 I downloaded in 2017 (but I guess it didn't change much in the meantime) and it contains only 1200 words. So my recommendation for you is to start reading now rather than learning another 1500 characters you won't have much use for until your vocabulary is much more advanced.
- _hao 7y ago
  Thanks for the advice, I appreciate it. I've taken a small break from studying (just reviews since I finished this experiment). I might follow your advice while still going forward with the second book, but not with the 50 chars/day pace, I'll perhaps tone it down. You're right that HSK1-3 (or even 4 as you suggest) are very trivial in terms of vocabulary.

james_s_tayler 7y ago

I treat language learning as a batch job at the beginning. Works pretty superbly for me. I usually batch pronunciation, then writing system, then grammar, then vocab. All the mean while try to do as much immersion as possible diving into native materials straight away and just enjoy the language in every way you can. There are a lot of different paths through language learning. They all work. But they don't all work for everyone. You just gotta try a bunch of different things and really find which path works for you.

yorwba 7y ago
> All the mean while try to do as much immersion as possible diving into native materials straight away and just enjoy the language in every way you can. Then you have already parallelized the process, have you not? > I usually batch pronunciation, then writing system, then grammar, then vocab. How does that ordering work in practice? I can imagine learning to pronounce each individual sound in isolation, and learning to write and pronounce each letter in the writing system before you know any words, but how do you learn about grammar without vocabulary to apply the grammar to? > There are a lot of different paths through language learning. They all work. But they don't all work for everyone. You just gotta try a bunch of different things and really find which path works for you. Agreed.
- james_s_tayler 7y ago
  Mostly works out fine. There isn't a perfectly strict separation between grammar ant vocab like you imagine. I do it through sentences, so naturally a little vocab is required for that, and that's ok. The goal in the grammar phase is to collect and Anki enough sentences to be able to parse sentences grammatically. I usually need about 3 to 5 sentences for each grammar point. The vocab phase is purely about vocab. Grammar is done at this point. I remember first year of Japanese study was Kanji then grammar. At the end of that first year I knew about 2000 words. The second year was purely vocab. I managed to acquire 10,000 new vocab by the end of the second year. After that point I could understand most spoken and written things with patches here and there. I could hold conversations for hours with a single person. In the 3rd year of study I did much the same. I remember my Anki vocab deck getting up to about 17k words before reviews were at about 300 to 400 a day and the returns were diminishing, so I just deleted the deck. Stopped cold. End of that 3rd year I could read novels pretty well. Hold conversations on any topic for any length of time in group settings. It worked remarkably well. It was damn hard work though.