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1,500 words in 30 days


kongli

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I just finished my first professional novel translation last month

You can't just make a comment like that without at least letting us know the name of the novel :mrgreen: I'm sure there'd be others interested too (feel free to start another thread about it to avoid derailing this one).

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Haha. I'm still wondering how poor kongli is holding up with his 50 words/day :P

Music (not Chinese) is what I do professionally. I realized long ago, in music, that the most interesting approaches to music are those that differ--often radically--from my own. These kinds of people are the ones who really teach me shit. These kinds of people are the ones I want in my band. But that's perhaps a too catholic way of looking at things. Plus irenicism is boring.

The proof is in the pudding, they say. Which is why when folks like renzhe and yersi and imron and skylee and roddy and heifeng and [...] speak, I listen.

Ok.

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Which is why when folks like renzhe and yersi and imron and skylee and roddy and heifeng and [...] speak, I listen.

I'm nowhere near as good as these people. I've just found that cramming helped me get over a hopeless plateau. It's a useful tool when used responsibly.

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  • 2 weeks later...

Hello all,

Taking a train to Shanghai tonight so figured I should respond to this thread since the supposed end date is tomorrow. Well, as I am sure you have already guest....I failed. It went okay the first 10 or so days but after that I just felt I was spending practically all my time memorizing words and not doing other potentially helpful exercises. Well that and I figured out I am pretty lazy :P . However I will say this, I was surprised at the amount of words I was able to keep in my head 4-5 days after learning them. I am going to keep trying to do heavy memorization but probably somewhere along the order of 20-25 words a day. I think this was an awakining for me that I could be learning words at a slightly faster pace....but not 50 a day. I got up to around 700 though and could do those with around 85% accuracy. Also, the exercise helped me realize that I want and should be doing a lot more reading. After about the first week I was having a lot more success casually reading a magazine that I was pulling words from. So I think it helps to pull words from selected sources and then review them not only with flashcards but also by reading and rereading articles.

Anyway, thanks for all those that contribute, sorry I didn't do more to keep this alive but I still think it was good exercise for myself. Also sorry for the jumbled post, a lot things that I am sure people already know but were just more reinforced for myself.

@Yersi: You win this round ;)

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  • 2 weeks later...

I've officially started the 50 per day 4 days ago. I am now up to 200 characters, not counting probably close to 100 more than I recognize even though I have not yet reached them in my official "program". I'd say I recognize about 90% of the characters I've learned so far. Although I only memorize the strokes for a small percent.

Its traditional characters.

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  • 3 weeks later...
I've officially started the 50 per day 4 days ago. I am now up to 200 characters
It sounds like you're talking about characters, not words. Do you learn characters on their own? If so, this will be very difficult to remember in the abstract but if you learn 50 characters through words, the plan seems very ambitious because you'll have to remember the words as well, and I wonder if it's practical at all. Slow down and aim for a longer term plan is what I would say.
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Do you learn characters on their own? If so, this will be very difficult to remember in the abstract

I didn't think so. I learned the vast majority of the characters I know on their own first, and without readings. I found they stuck much better than the other way.

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  • 10 months later...
can be done. although the test that comes 6 months later may be a different story

A popular thing to say in this thread, but I'm not sure why - in the post right above yours I said that months later I could still recognise >80% of the words that I *hadn't* been using in my reading. If one uses a decent SRS to maintain the words for the full 6 months, or one occupies one's time with other appropriate learning activities, why should there be a significant decline in the recognition of words?

There are of course, other caveats. If someone says he can "learn 1500 words in 1 month", he is probably not using a very strict definition of "learn". In my opinion, a word is not fully learned till it can be easily used - or at least recognised - in fluent conversation, and this is more than flashcarding alone can achieve. Achieving a fluent vocabulary is much more difficult and time-consuming than achieving an "in-head dictionary", as I like to think of it. In my post above, I talk about learning 1400 words in 40 days, but of course to convert that vocabulary into a useful form took many additional hours of reading and listening practice.

Anyway, simple flashcard recognition/recall, even over months, is practically a trivial task nowadays, what with all the technology floating around to help us. Cramming a great deal of words at once may have its disadvantages, but forgetting all of the words afterwards needn't be one of them.

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To neverending:

This step up from the "in-head dictionary" to useable language is so big and takes so much additional work, that once I've done that work I am always thinking in hindsight that the flashcarding part was a relative triviality, or was sort of beside the point.

Do you sometimes think this?

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