Learning tips

Here is a placeholder for tips on learning Chinese with Anki and Chinese-support-addon. Please don't hesitate to add your recommendations (you need to sign-in to Github first).

General tips:

• Be sure to review every day. Find a way to include Anki in your daily routine (eg: before sleeping, or during your commute) to keep going past the 3-months period.
• If you have one-on-one lessons: ask your teacher to add the new vocabulary for you (the teacher can have a synced copy of each student's deck with the "File->Switch profile" feature.)
• Start slow, aim for the long-term. If you add too many cards the 1st week, you won't be able to keep up when your enthusiasm fades.
• Look at your statistics every day. Focus on your progress, eg: celebrate when you get to 50 characters.
• Decide how long you're willing to spend on Anki each day, and set the number of new cards each day accordingly. 3 new cards equates to about 5–10 minutes; 5 cards, 15–20 mins; 10 cards, 40–60 mins.
• Limit the maximum reviews/day so that you don't get overloaded. At first, set this limit really high. After studying with a particular deck for a while, check your statistics and find out the average amount of cards you study each day. Then set the maximum reviews limit to a little higher than this average.
• Be selective with which words you add. Don't add cards that are too easy to remember (e.g. 你好) or cards that contain highly specialized vocabulary unless you need it (e.g. 脑血管疾病—this is okay... if you're a doctor).
• Try to copy the audio and repeat the word out loud (if you're alone). This will help your pronunciation greatly. (Warning: Google TTS pronounces most word with an 'i' sound strangely: e.g. 'zhi')
• Fiddle with the card settings and make sure the font is large enough.
• It's okay to miss a day once in a while, that's why you limit the maximum reviews; you will, however, have to spend a little extra time catching up.
• If you saw a word in a book, or you read it somewhere, try to add the whole sentence in a new field called "Example" or "Context". Then highlight the word.

What's a good starting deck for learning Chinese?

It may seem counter-intuitive, but I highly recommend you don't start with a ready-made deck. It feels like learning the phone book.

You have to get a feel for each word or character you learn, and for that, it's best if you start with lessons and add vocabulary as you learn it. The effort you spend fumbling typing Chinese is time well spent.

How to deal with leeches (hard-to remember words)?

Context is very important for effective memorization. Try to look up a word on the Internet, ask a friend, or create a mnemonic.

Learning the meaning of the individual characters composing a multiple-character word may help.

You can look up a word in Baidu Image, choose a vivid illustration, and paste it in your deck. This works well for more abstract concepts.

Also, don't be ashamed to just suspend it for a few weeks or months. Most likely, it will be easier to learn then.

Dealing with synonyms

Chinese, maybe more than other languages, has many, many synonyms (chinese words with very similar meanings). They can cause quite a headache to SRS users, as one question still has to have a single answer. Here are two suggestions to help you tackle that issue.

Distinguish synonyms to learn them better

Here's a great tip posted by itraveler on the Anki-help Google Group.

The problem of polysemy is the main difficulty in the study of vocabulary. The best way to solve it, as mentioned in the manual and by other users, is the use of context. For myself, I found a solution using two Note Types:

1.Create a Basic Note Type for the lexeme data - spelling, pronunciation, basic meaning, etc. On the basis of these data you will form standard cards. 2.Create a Cloze Note Type, which will accumulate polysemants of that lexeme. The first field contains the word itself - for identification. Each next field will contain the a sentence that reflects a certain sense of the word. The word highlight with Cloze Deletion and as a hint take concrete translation of this word in the current context.

As a result, we solve several problems:

1.The separation of lexical and semantic components of a word allows to avoid multiple copies of information, because there is no point in creating a similar series of cards for each semantic meaning of the word. 2.The storage of polysemants together lets to get benefit from the sibling mechanism. 3.Automatically eliminating the problem of identifying and finding the necessary data, which relate to one lexeme. 4.Very important - we still retain the principle of minimum information for each card.

Hopefully some ideas will be helpful in solving your problem!