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I have been using SRS to learn Mandarin Chinese for the last 2 years now and I can also verify it is extremely effective when used correctly, and when understan
by jliechti1 13y ago
I have been using SRS to learn Mandarin Chinese for the last 2 years now and I can also verify it is extremely effective when used correctly, and when understanding its' advantages and limitations.
I think sentences are also a much better way to learn than learning single vocabulary words, because they show the usage of the word in context. This is very important for speaking naturally and idiomatically.
Once you get beyond a beginner level, choosing a direction of study can be a little difficult. My technique is to find sentences or phrases from conversations I have with people, books/articles I read, and from movies/television shows - and then input it into the SRS. Preferably, each sentence has 1 new novel phrase or vocabulary word. Although this can be time consuming it gives a huge benefit. Let me give an example:
Question side: “問題是。。。你不覺得這樣，很。。。虛偽嗎？"
Answer side: 虛偽 (xūwěi - hypocritical, artificial)
So, in this case the second last two characters made up the word that I was unfamiliar with, so I put that on the answer side. The huge benefit is that I found this sentence in a book I am reading - so every time it comes up in the SRS, I not only recall the sentence, I recall the context of the story (in this case a dialogue between two characters), and this has a double reinforcing effect. In the same way, that if a TV or movie character says a sentence over and over again in a video, it will cause you to remember the scene of the sentence, and at which part of the story the movie was in at the time.
The contrast of this method would be to find "pre-made" decks of cards for sentences in the language you are learning, but I find that it is harder to remember the items when the sentences are not as meaningful to you.
A key point for using SRS effectively is to use to review material already learned, not to learn new never before seen material. The article itself even mentions this.
(Also, Mnemosyne is my SRS of choice http://mnemosyne-proj.org/ http://mnemosyne-proj.org/, but Anki is a good choice too.)
- riggins 13y agoI'd like to learn Mandarin. Can you give details on how you're doing this? Like what you use for initially learning the material and what you use for SRS?
- jliechti1 13y agoDefinitely - contact me at the email in my profile and I can tell you more about my specific approach for Mandarin. (Don't want to sidetrack the thread too much.)
- tunesmith 13y agoFor me, I downloaded a chinese deck from the shared Anki deck website. There's a series of ten of them. I also wanted to learn the strokes and how to say them and draw them, so I downloaded the "eStroke" app for my iPhone, and practiced drawing them in the air. Wasn't motivated enough to get ink and paper. :-) I also figured out how to do pinyin on my computer, and input strokes on the phone for character recognition. So, I dunno - I would do a few cards a day, but my retention was poor. I realized I was more interested in learning how to learn Chinese, rather than learning Chinese itself. And, doing the cards 10 minutes a day isn't enough - you have to be doing some sort of other activity with it simultaneously. I deleted the deck eventually. :)
- gurkendoktor 13y agoI am using Pleco on my phone as an SRS for Mandarin. (Setting it up to be a proper SRS hurts, though.) The absolutely great thing about Pleco is that it is a great dictionary app and a document reader in the same app. When you see the solution of a flash card, it usually includes a handful of example sentences. You can then tap on words in these sentences and see their definition again... It is a little like getting stuck in Wikipedia - sometimes I spend half an hour only reading examples starting from my current flashcard. I have no solid statistics on this, but I feel that the context really helps me to memorise things :)