How much time to spend on vocabulary per day

[Friday]

How much time do you recommend studying vocabulary each day? I've been using Anki with sentence cards.

[abcdefg]

The time I spend with Anki varies greatly, depending on whether I'm just trying to "maintain" the vocabulary that I already know, or am actively adding lots of new items to it.

So, no magic number. I find it works better in small batches, done several times a day, than all at one long sitting.

[murrayjames]

I spend about an hour with Mnemosyne a day, also with sentence cards. Before going out I'll dump cards into my Android phone. When I have time to kill--on the subway, say--I'll take out my phone and do some reviews. I add new cards all the time.

[imron]

When I'm in vocabulary learning mode, I'll try to spend enough time to learn 5-10 words a day (with one word possibly containing several characters), plus revise any previous ones. I also try to spend at least the same amount of time or more reading native materials (which is where I get the words from).

If I find revising flashcards is taking too much time (more than say 20-30 mins a day), then I delete the entire stack and start again. The logic being that I'll either know the word already in which case it probably didn't need to be in the stack anymore anyway, or I won't know the word, but because I'm getting all the words from material I'm reading, the useful words that I hadn't learnt fully will get added again because they'll be appearing regularly in the text. The less useful words won't appear regularly and so they won't get added, but I don't care so much because they are less useful so there's not much point spending time on them

[rezaf]

It depends on your level and the method you prefer to use. Personally I think it's good to focus more on vocabulary at the beginning for about 2~3 hours a day. At intermediate level I believe one should focus on listening, reading and speaking to gradually learn how to use the words he already knows and at upper-intermediate one should focus more on learning more difficult words and also writing. Now I spend 1~2 hours everyday and 4~6 hours a day in the weekends or holidays. I also try to write a few emails or essays every week to my language exchange partners. After I finish my classes this summer I think I will be able to spend even more time on vocabulary.

[amandagmu]

I don't review vocab for more than a few minutes a few times per week max. Instead, I read things that will likely contain the new words or I write sentences. This might only be possible at higher levels of the language... but I do know that reading or watching something (or writing or speaking with a Chinese friend) makes me much more likely to retain it than just sitting around trying to remember something. This is especially true with 成语.

[c_redman]

Usually around 30-40 minutes at a session, or whenever I get fatigued. Just like with physical exercise, there is a point at which further work has diminishing benefit. Anki has settings for timeboxing that work great for preventing overwork. Depending on deck size, this potentially means the queue will build up with rollover cards. You just need to trust that it will work itself out over time. The simplest way to reduce the backlog is to cut back on the rate of new cards per day. If that's not enough, it's time to take a look at pruning the deck.

If I'm studying large quantities of completely new words, I'll go closer to an hour a day. But that's using regular flashcards to introduce the words, not SRS.

[imron]

but I do know that reading or watching something (or writing or speaking with a Chinese friend) makes me much more likely to retain it than just sitting around trying to remember something

Agree, which is why I try to make sure I always spend more time using the language than just going over flashcards. I also find however that it's important to pay attention to vocab at the higher levels because once you get to 95% comprehension it's quite easy to just get by and mostly understand everything, and then get lazy about learning the unknown words that you can more or less guess or ignore. I've found putting in a bit of extra time to focus on the remaining few percent to be very useful, and this stage, depending on the material, these words may not be repeating themselves so frequently.

[murrayjames]

imron, how do you retain those infrequent words? Is daily reading/conversation enough to reinforce them?

[rezaf]

My wordlist is alphabetical according to dictionary that's why it's easy to review the words. For instance one day I decide to recite all the words I know that start with can, cang, cao, ...

[imron]

I use flashcards to drill them initially, then I rely on repetition through access to native material. You'd be surprised at how much that remaining few percent actually show up in multiple sources if you read widely and regularly enough. Many times I've thought I'd never see a word again, only to have it appear in another book or article several weeks or even months later (or sometimes even the same day but from a completely unrelated source!).

Doing the maths, if I add up the total number of characters in the books I've read so far this year, it's over 2 million characters. Based on that, even characters with a frequency of 0.001% will still show up 20 times And that's only for books, if you add news articles and other materials, then the number will likely to be higher.

I also find that once you've got a few thousand characters under your belt, it becomes easier to remember newer characters because 99% of the time it's just a character you already know with a different/added radical, and maybe a different pronunciation. Perhaps more important though is learning words through the context of native materials, because when you are learning them you are usually building a story/environment in your head of what is happening and you naturally have an association of that part of the story with the word. There are many words where I can remember the exact scenario of the book/story where I learnt it, and I find that helps immensely.

In the end though, I'm not too fussed if I forget any because if I have forgotten them and I come across them again I'll simply add them back to my current set of flashcards (which as mentioned above, I do complete purges of at regular intervals). Eventually it'll stick, or the word probably wasn't common enough for me to care. I also am pretty strict about keeping to a manageable level of new words per day - usually never more than 5-10. If I come across any other new words after that limit I'll usually just ignore them (but perhaps make a mental note of ones that were appearing more regularly), because the useful ones will come up again on another day anyway, and I'll add them then.

Edited June 1, 2011 at 07:55 AM by imron
updated frequency percentages to reflect approx level at > 95%

[rezaf]

Imron I think the remaining few percent is not really just a few percent in academic works or more serious literature. So at higher levels these words or phrases that are not used in everyday life are actually very common and that few percent which needs a lot of work to learn is the difference between a(for example) professional writer and a normal high school graduate(like a shopkeeper etc.) native speaker.

[imron]

That's true, but at some point though, you'll still get to the stage where it does become just that few percent in academic works/serious literature, and then the same problem applies.

I do agree that learning that last few percent is the hardest part, it's a lot of extra work for only tiny percentage gains in understanding - but it's definitely needed if you want to get your Chinese beyond 'good enough'.