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thanks for sharing! when I started learning mandarin, pre-made Anki decks felt overwhelming and I've been building and using a personal deck ever since. Can you

thanks for sharing! when I started learning mandarin, pre-made Anki decks felt overwhelming and I've been building and using a personal deck ever since. Can you recommend a pre-built deck for Chinese grammar, if you ever tried a good one?

nullsense 6y ago
I don't remember what I initially used for Mandarin. I tend to use a mixture of pre-made and handmade decks. A good pre-made deck is a godsend, but I always have a handmade one in addition for stuff that I find. Looking at the shared Anki decks, "Chinese Grammar Wiki Study Deck" looks pretty good. It's perhaps a little large, but I target 35 new cards a day, for a pace of 1000 new cards a month assuming 80% of the time I'll hit that the goal is 10k in one year. So 5k cards puts that at 5 months for me. "Chinese Grammar Wiki A1-B2" is potentially a better starting point if want a smaller, more manageable deck. That one only has 500 or so cards, which is easy to knock off in a couple of weeks. "Listening Deck for Chinese 4th Year" looks like a very good deck. It seems to have everything I would want; reading cards + listening cards - both of these are absolutely essential with Mandarin, it also goes from HSK1 to HSK6 and has a lot of cards. It probably has too many for me, so I would look at how to approach it but the quality of the resource seems great from what I can see, so would be very interested in this one. Sentences possibly come from a site called SpoonFed from what I can tell. How I use a particular deck depends on my goals. I modify them to suit my needs where I can. For example the Portuguese deck I'm using at the moment I think had 2 card types, maybe PT -> En and En -> PT, or perhaps it was listening and reading etc, but I know the only skill I need to train with Portuguese is listening, so I changed the deck to remove the card types I didn't need. The other thing that has worked well is suspending all cards on decks that are far too large to do all the cards, and using a list of grammar points or vocab and using the search feature to selectively unsuspend a few cards per thing that you're searching for. "20000 chinese - english sentences with proper pinyin" looks like a deck you could do that with. Inputting stuff into Anki takes time, so I try to minimise that time. Not eliminate it, because there's very much a large amount of utility in handmaking decks. But for example a good online dictionary where you can copy / paste sentences is a benefit. Generally when it comes to decks I'm looking for 2 kinds. Either a starter deck, or a complete reference deck. The perfect starter deck is around 2k sentences with audio (if no audio I just use TTS and this is good enough!) and covers from A1 grammar up to at least B2, but if it covers more then that's a bonus. B2 is like upper intermediate, and that range is all the common day to day stuff you hear and use all the time. I think like HSK1 to HSK4 in the case of Mandarin. Complete reference decks are usually between 5k to 10k sentences and are often from some corpus or dictionary. These are the type I like to suspend all and selectively unsuspend if I have a need for that. With decks I take what I can get, but I generally have a standard I'm looking for and if nothing pre-made meets the standard I'll find good reference materials and handmake it instead. Hope that helps.
- saint_angels 6y ago
  that helps! Especially ways of dealing with large decks. Thanks

nullsense 6y ago

I don't remember what I initially used for Mandarin. I tend to use a mixture of pre-made and handmade decks. A good pre-made deck is a godsend, but I always have a handmade one in addition for stuff that I find. Looking at the shared Anki decks, "Chinese Grammar Wiki Study Deck" looks pretty good. It's perhaps a little large, but I target 35 new cards a day, for a pace of 1000 new cards a month assuming 80% of the time I'll hit that the goal is 10k in one year. So 5k cards puts that at 5 months for me. "Chinese Grammar Wiki A1-B2" is potentially a better starting point if want a smaller, more manageable deck. That one only has 500 or so cards, which is easy to knock off in a couple of weeks. "Listening Deck for Chinese 4th Year" looks like a very good deck. It seems to have everything I would want; reading cards + listening cards - both of these are absolutely essential with Mandarin, it also goes from HSK1 to HSK6 and has a lot of cards. It probably has too many for me, so I would look at how to approach it but the quality of the resource seems great from what I can see, so would be very interested in this one. Sentences possibly come from a site called SpoonFed from what I can tell. How I use a particular deck depends on my goals. I modify them to suit my needs where I can. For example the Portuguese deck I'm using at the moment I think had 2 card types, maybe PT -> En and En -> PT, or perhaps it was listening and reading etc, but I know the only skill I need to train with Portuguese is listening, so I changed the deck to remove the card types I didn't need. The other thing that has worked well is suspending all cards on decks that are far too large to do all the cards, and using a list of grammar points or vocab and using the search feature to selectively unsuspend a few cards per thing that you're searching for. "20000 chinese - english sentences with proper pinyin" looks like a deck you could do that with. Inputting stuff into Anki takes time, so I try to minimise that time. Not eliminate it, because there's very much a large amount of utility in handmaking decks. But for example a good online dictionary where you can copy / paste sentences is a benefit. Generally when it comes to decks I'm looking for 2 kinds. Either a starter deck, or a complete reference deck. The perfect starter deck is around 2k sentences with audio (if no audio I just use TTS and this is good enough!) and covers from A1 grammar up to at least B2, but if it covers more then that's a bonus. B2 is like upper intermediate, and that range is all the common day to day stuff you hear and use all the time. I think like HSK1 to HSK4 in the case of Mandarin. Complete reference decks are usually between 5k to 10k sentences and are often from some corpus or dictionary. These are the type I like to suspend all and selectively unsuspend if I have a need for that. With decks I take what I can get, but I generally have a standard I'm looking for and if nothing pre-made meets the standard I'll find good reference materials and handmake it instead. Hope that helps.

saint_angels 6y ago
that helps! Especially ways of dealing with large decks. Thanks