Memorizing words versus Phrases

[weilian]

I have, too late in my opinion, discovered SRS memory programs which have really helped my writing and speaking. I'm at the tail end of an intensive program that has brought me from no Chinese up to learning 60-80 words per day.

Taking into account the fact that students always know more than they can say, how can I maximize what I can say/understand. I live in China, study everyday and the SRS program has really helped me so much with characters. Would it make sense to put in full phrases to this, rather than just words and their common usages?

Best,

Weilian

[yersi]

Definitely, if you feel they can be useful. It's not a practical way of learning though, and you should put more emphasis on being able to make sentences on the fly.

[renzhe]

I find that ridiculous amounts of listening are unbeatable when it comes to actually understanding spoken language, and ridiculous amounts of reading are the way to improve your reading.

I've had good success with learning words, then watching lots of TV shows, many TV shows, hours on end. Obviously, living in China, you will have many other opportunities to listen to real conversations.

[L-F-J]

i find it useful to learn phrases but of course understanding the words that make it up individually too. perhaps its about collocation and developing a natural sense of whats right and wrong in the language. just individual words alone wont give you that. unless you're already at a high enough level to where grammar is not an issue at all. by the way 60-80 words per day is awesome, if you can retain them all!

[myann23]

I throw everything but the kitchen sink into my Supermemo. Sometimes I use words in sentences, sometimes I just use the word only. If it's a physical noun or something simple to understand, I just usually stick with the word. In addition to these, I also to grammar points and short translations from English to Chinese (the shorter the better).

Learning 60-80 words a day is pretty good. I can do 40-50 now, but if I had all day to learn Chinese I could probably do 70-80. Who knows, maybe 100 is feasible but the most important point is not how many you can input in your head in a single day, but if you can remember what the word means after you haven't seen or heard it for say 20 days. This is where the SRS program kicks in and so far, I'm pretty pleased with it. It's not the end all, be all of learning Chinese, but it can definitely help you on your path. Still have to get a lot of reading and especially listening in.

[renzhe]

Those are really impressive numbers.

I'm happy if I get in 50 words per week. With my current database, if I learned 50 a day, I would probably have to review about 500 every day.

[weilian]

I usually get about 500 cards per day, including new inputs, and to be honest its difficult to keep up during the week with some of my new cards, especially towards the end of the week. I save Friday and Saturday for just review or make up of cards I missed on Thursday night.

I know understand the real benefit of an SRS is the long-term retention rather than the pseudo-flashcard aspect. The two biggest problems I have are time and getting a precise enough definition for each word. For example, 特殊， 专门， 特别 or 规矩， 礼仪 all got learned on the same day. Its quite difficult to differentiate them in the definition second, even if I ad a sentence because the are similar.

[renzhe]

That's great determination there. Respect!

I find that my mind wanders off after 100-150 cards to review, so I try to keep my cards for review (characters + words) in this range. On top of this, I have another 50-100 in my drilling deck, which I go through several times per day for a few days until I know them inside out, after which I add them to the memorised cards and get another batch to drill.

I also try to keep the flashcard aspect to under one hour per day, so I have more time for reading and listening practice.

[weilian]

renzhe,

That's the way to do it really. The large numbers are a function of two things - three hours of class per day and my Chinese level - just barely intermediate (I think).

As for listening and reading, to be honest, I see them falling behind quite a bit. The issue is one of time - I don't have too much of it due the pace of my classes. So I listen to the dialogues and watch some TV, which I don't really understand yet.

My program is up on Friday of next week, afterwards, my new word input into Anki will go down significantly, although I aim to add in words I've learned prior to discovering Anki.

[renzhe]

I think that, as your level improves, your numbers will start to level off, and you'll get more into reading and listening. This is very important to get the finer points of the words you've learned -- the initial memorisation is just the initial step towards learning the vocabulary.

As your vocabulary increases, you'll find it easier to follow TV shows and read, and it will become more fun than it is now, so your focus might shift to this. I always recommend comics for kids for reading and simple TV shows -- reading and listening is the best way to improve reading and listening.

You might want to check our TV Episode project over in Films & Television. There are many examples, with download links, and even a (very rough) grading of the language difficulty in each show. Some shows also have vocabulary lists and plot summaries, to help you follow the story and figure out the names and relationships. When I started watching TV shows, I was at a lower level than you are now, and I found it to really help my listening comprehension more than anything else. You can give it a shot, it will only take an hour or so of your time. An easy (but really good) show to start with could be Empty Mirror, there is even a vocabulary list there.

Yes, I am shamelessly advertising this project in every post, because I find it to be an awesome resource.

[dsrguru]

weilian, I think it's a great idea to add whole phrases to your SRS program. I'm using the FSI course, which is great for vocabulary and grammar, but it doesn't teach reading and writing at all. I input the 漢字 (both traditional and simplified) for each FSI target sentence I've learned into Mnemosyne. This has three benefits: (1) I retain virtually all of my vocabulary, (2) grammar comes naturally to me, and (3) I can read everything that I can say and understand.

It's not a practical way of learning though, and you should put more emphasis on being able to make sentences on the fly.

I strongly disagree. If you focus on generating sentences on the fly before you've been exposed to enough native speech, you might use words incorrectly or make sentences that sound awkward to native speakers. If you restrict your learning to sentences spoken by native speakers, you will sound much more native after learning several thousand sentences, which is made relatively easy by SRS software. Khatzumoto from http://www.alljapaneseallthetime.com says that the magic number is 10,000 sentences. If you've never used an SRS program before, it's probably difficult for you to understand how amazing the whole SRS concept is. I highly recommend checking out Khatzumoto's site even if you aren't learning Japanese.

[roddy]

Which is great for anyone with the leisure to learn ten thousand sentences before opening their mouths. I'm dubious about the 'massive exposure before production' methodologies at best, but when it comes to anyone actually learning on the ground, they're surely useless?

[dsrguru]

roddy, it's not about exposure before opening your mouth. You don't wait until the 10,000 mark to start talking with the SRS method. That would certainly be ridiculous. My argument is that you shouldn't try to generate your own sentences to study. Study native speakers' sentences (and it's those that you plug into your SRS program). Obviously, it's important to practice simple substitution, and with FSI I do so regularly. With the SRS technique, you understand many sentence patterns after several dozens of sentences, not thousands. The 10,000 mark is simply the point at which you will have been exposed to so many different sentences that constructing correct sentences about almost anything will be easy. You'll still be able to construct correct sentences about certain topics after a couple dozen sentences. I hope my first post didn't give the impression that you should never speak sentences until the number 10,000 at which point everything magically clicks in your head.

[roddy]

Fair enough, i was taking a bit of an extreme view, I guess. . .

[realmayo]

The Khatzumoto guy's 10,000 sentence is a nice theory I suppose but it's only one guy's theory -- one guy who can write very persuasively about why he's right and the rest of the world is wrong and a bit stupid and missing the point.

as far as I can see, all he's really saying is: read & understand a lot of real sentences in your target language. an SRS is a convenient way to do this, I suppose, but I'm not sure how much more useful it is than just getting, say, a transcript of a film or TV series and ploughing through that, making sure you understand everything and jotting down any grammar or sentence construction or vocab that you want to look at again.

in fact, the repetition element may actually waste a bit of your time: I understand the theory behind SRS and I use SRS a lot for characters, vocab ... but for sentences: if you've got, say, a sentence that follows a common pattern, why put it in your SRS and regularly "test yourself" on it -- instead you could be reading a book and seeing lots of examples of that sentence structure, but with different vocab and in different contexts....

[dsrguru]

realmayo, once you're comfortable with that sentence, you won't see it again for many months or even well over a year, so it won't be wasting your time. The purpose of plugging whole sentences into SRS is that you won't forget sentence patterns you don't come across a lot in reading or watching movies or whatever. It's fine if you prefer to use your SRS program just for memorizing characters, which is in fact kind of what I'm doing. I just feel that if you enter whole sentences into the software, you get the added benefit of keeping sentence patterns fresh in your mind, and I, at least, still learn the characters and vocabulary as if I were just entering those into the SRS. If this method doesn't work as well for you, it's totally fine with me if you stick to individual words/phrases.

[realmayo]

Well, as long as it's okay with you.... Though the 10,000-sentence website is a bit more severe!