Comprehension with politicals related stuff

[Alnosr]

10/31 : Hello ,I'm studying chinese since 2,5 years and my level is between hsk 5-6.
I'm doing my undergraduate program in Taiwan in political sciences related field. I'm sorta okay because our textbook are in English so I can make sense of what the teachers says, but the real struggle is the ppt and chinese book.

My goal is to not lean on English for the future, I wish to be able to read the Chinese ppt like I would read it English.

 

But the problem is every week we have a new ppt, and every new ppt , I have according to Chinese text analyser  70%(sometimes a bit less) comprehension and around 300-400 unknown word. At first I was only learning the most 100 frequent word to get me around 80%. But I realized I won't reach my goal like that. Or In  ten years.

 

So I'm starting to ask myself if wherether or not I should learn all unknown word from these ppt. Thing is, since I started  learning Chinese until now the method I used was all along the same ; for every new word I would search an example sentence for it, ask someone to record the sentence for me and learn it by heart. This way I could remember it very well in context and also practicing my pronunciation.

I'm thinking, since it's a PPT its supposed to be a summary. Thus maybe every word in it will come again or in the future I would need to usenyhrl thus I need to learn and master them well, and I can continue with my method.

 

But on the other side... It may be not the best optimization possible? Like , maybe doing that let me waste lot of time ? What if lot of these word were actually useless and just recognize it passively would suffise? I don't know, I have no idea how to judge. (But doing this tbh I have a sensation like I didn't do my homework well, not really mastering the word well haha)

(Also Im very aware that reading require more than just knowing vocabulary but also confidence, stamina and stuff. But the very first step is to know the vocabulary right? At least  enough to have a comprehension of 90 maybe more.)

 

Can you guys tell me your opinion please?   According to my situation what would be the best choice possible? Learning these word individually to speed up the process to the detriment of actually mastering the word or taking my time to look up every words , search for appropriate sentence, differences etc. to the detriment of -maybe- losing huge amount of time?
Or do you guys have any other view on it?

Thank you so much, I'm very 糾結。
Attaching is unknown words from one week's ppt if necessary.

 

11/10 : or maybe I'm thinking completely  wrong  and need to continue the most frequent 100 words and besides  start to actually cultivate my reading ability -including- the ability to guess a words meaning by its character? I had this revelation yesterday night, took a random page of a ppt and well sometimes even if I takes me quite time I can guess some of them. Afterwards I still need to confirm by checking in dictionary but I guess doing this work make the word easier to remember for next time.

w5 all.txt

[Lu]

The difficulty in what you are doing is that you are leaning new vocab (Chinese words) and new content (political science knowledge) at the same time, while most of your classmates are only learning new content, and most other people learning Chinese are only learning new vocab. So, this is not easy and my hat's off to you for doing it.

 

3 hours ago, Alnosr said:

I'm thinking, since it's a PPT its supposed to be a summary. Thus maybe every word in it will come again or in the future I would need to use them.

I agree with your thinking here. Many of those words will come back, either in your classes or at the very least in an exam. How much you can do depends on how much time you have, but my priorities would be something like:

- Look up all the unknown words once.
- Learn as many unknown words as you can passively.

- Learn the 100 most useful unknown words inside and out.

- Learn all the words actively inside and out.

 

You post a word list at the end, what is that? There are a lot of doubles in the list; a lot of words I'd expect you to know already (弱，易); some words that look pretty specialised to me; but also a lot of words that you will really need in your studies even if they are not very frequent (北爱尔兰).

[roddy]

The recording / learn by heart method seems excessive when you have such huge quantities of vocabulary to get through. 

[Apollys]

I would advise you to set for yourself three "levels" of studying a new word.

1. Minimal - just look it up in a dictionary
2. Moderate - look up the word plus an example sentence, read the sentence aloud a couple times, and maybe write the word once or twice
3. Full - employ the full new-word-learning method that you've found best suits you (I recommend some form of Spaced Repetition Software to ensure efficient retention in addition to sample sentences as you've mentioned)

 

First time you see a new word, use the level 1 learning method.  Second time, if you've forgotten, still level 1.

 

Once you've seen a word in 3+ different contexts, employ the level 2 learning method.

 

Around 5-6 times (though you can adjust based on experience), you can consider the word worthy of your full level 3 learning method.

 

I don't say this lightly, but it honestly sounds like you've given yourself quite the trial by fire, and you're working very hard and progressing quickly given the time frame.  Keep up the hard work!