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Learning how to learn Chinese through self-experimentation

By On May 21, 2013 · Leave a Comment · In Advanced, Attitude and mentality, Beginner, Intermediate, Key study hacks, Learning outside class, Organising and planning, Science and research

Language research is notoriously difficult to perform properly simply because variables in a real classroom are hard to keep constant. Let’s say that we want to examine the effectiveness of a new learning strategy. In order to be able to say anything with certainty, we need a fairly large sample and we need to find a way of testing the new strategy that isn’t biased in any direction.

Image credit: sxc.hu/profile/ninci

Image credit: sxc.hu/profile/ninci

One problem is that in order for random factors to balance each other out, we need large, random samples. If the study becomes too large to conduct by one single teacher, suddenly different teachers are involved, too. This quickly escalates into the realm of meaninglessness. The problem is that the variation between countries, schools, teachers and individual students is bound to be large, perhaps large enough to render the results meaningless for any given individual.

If we could prove that the learning strategy was 5% more efficient than another, that doesn’t really help you, does it? Other factors will influence you more than the actual strategy you use. For instance, if you like the method or not might make much more of a difference than the effectiveness of the method itself.

Self-experimentation and n=1

How can an experiment with only one participant (n=1) be of any value? Most scientific journals will (rightfully) say “no”, because they don’t really care about you as an individual. But you care about your own learning, don’t you? Therefore, self experimentation can be of tremendous help if that single student is yourself.

If you conduct the experiment to learn more about yourself and the way you learn, no-one requires you to follow any rules, but it does make sense to follow the scientific method in general, because otherwise your results won’t be reliable even for the single student.

In case you haven’t done much research recently, here is a crash course in the scientific method:

  1. Ask a question – This can be anything related to how you learn Chinese. For instance, you might want to know if it matters at what time of the day you review words, if it helps retention to read the words aloud or if colouring tones helps you remember them. Since you only have one person to experiment on, you won’t be able to test things you can only do once, so you’re not likely to be able to test things like “which is the best method to prepare for HSK 3″.
  2. Formulate an hypothesis – In essence, this is a guess at what the answer to the question might be. According to what you know, make an educated guess. For instance, my hypothesis is that I review best in the morning and that reading aloud does help increase retention rates. I also think that colouring the tones should be useful.
  3. Predict consequences – If your hypothesis is correct, what kind of observable results should you be able to observe? In some cases this is very obvious. Looking at our examples, we would expect to remember more cards in the morning than at other times during the day. We would also expect higher retention rates for cards read aloud as well as better tone recall when tones are coloured.
  4. Test the hypothesis – This is the experiment itself by far the hardest part to get right, both in practice and in theory. We need to come up with a way of testing the hypothesis that only gives a positive result if the hypothesis is correct. The key here is to keep variables as constant as possible. For instance, we could separate our flashcards into two decks and then review one deck in the morning and the other in the afternoon, but we would have to sort the cards randomly, because otherwise one group of cards might contain easier cards on average, which will lead us to the wrong conclusion. We could also add a tag to half of our flashcards and read all those cards aloud and then check if there was any difference between the two groups. However, we need to make sure that we don’t spend more time reading those cards, because more time spent obviously means higher retention.
  5. Analysis – Based on the testing above, we might be able to prove the hypothesis true or false. Depending on the experiment, we might need to formulate a new hypothesis and keep on experimenting. We might also find that our result is inconclusive, perhaps because we made some mistake or didn’t design the test well enough. The goal with the analysis is to interpret the outcome of the test and determine what to do next.

How to conduct these kinds of experiments in Anki

I’ve had many debates with people who think there are better flashcard software than Anki and one of the reason I maintain Anki is superior is because of it’s flexibility. In Anki (especially in Anki 2), you can manage and edit your flashcards in bulk in almost any way you wish. Split, merge, tag, anything you want.

You want to add a tag to half the cards and add a star after the final character for all those cards (so you know which characters to read aloud)? Easy. Do you want to temporarily split all your cards into two decks, track statistics for these two decks separately and then merge them again when the experiment in done? Sure. In fact, Anki already has statistics for hourly performance.

This is what my graph looks like:

ankihourly

There are some 113063 reviews behind those bars, so whatever differences we can see here are statistically very significant. It seems my hypothesis was wrong (obviously, I knew the answer when I wrote the article, my hypothesis was the one I had before I saw this graph). It seems I remember best when reviewing around lunch. Interesting. Not surprisingly, I have the lowest retention rate late at night.

This case happened to be rather easy because Anki already has a built-in function to check hourly retention rates, but what if you want to check something else, like if reading aloud is helpful or not? As I mentioned above, the best thing you can do is create a new deck with all words you intend to read aloud. As far as I know, you can’t sort randomly (that’s not sorting, technically), but you can sort on an arbitrary value, such as the initial letter of the English or some other factor which should be random for practical purposes, albeit not technically. Then grab half the words and change them to a new deck. Conduct the experiment and see if the groups differ. Of course, you don’t need to do this with all cards if you don’t want to, testing with a few hundred might be enough.

The two other examples I brought up yielded fairly unexpected results, actually. It turned out that both reading words aloud and colouring the tones had an effect, but that it was very small indeed; I expected the effect to be much bigger. However, remember that even though that might be the case for me, we shouldn’t extrapolate that result to you, because you might be different.

This isn’t “real” science (you probably won’t get your results published)

This isn’t” real” science, but that doesn’t mean that scientific thinking isn’t necessary. In fact, this kind of thinking is always good to adopt, even if you’re not conducting any experiments at all.

For instance, I said above that you can’t really experiment on different ways of preparing for the HSK simply because if you succeed, you can’t try again. However, you can still apply the same kind of thinking.

  • What did you try to achieve?
  • What happened?
  • Why did that happen?
  • What can you do to make it work better next time?

The results might not be reliable either, because there are many things going on that are beyond your control. Perhaps you will learn better because you know that you want one method to be better and therefore try a little harder. Perhaps you unconsciously make a hundred other small adjustments. Therefore, I wouldn’t care too much about small differences achieved over a short time with few words. If you have results like my hourly retention rates above, though, that were produced based on over 100,000 reviews, the results are probably not based on other random factors.

More than words

I’ve spent most of this article talking about vocabulary and how to pronounce characters and words, but that just happens to be a convenient example. You can conduct similar experiments in many other areas. Identify the problem, formulate an hypothesis as to how the problem can be solved, try your solution, evaluate. Repeat. Doing this will help you understand both yourself and Chinese. It will bring benefits well beyond the realm of language learning as well.

Further reading

For anyone who is interested in reading more about self-experimentation, I want to recommend Seth Robert’s blog, “Personal Science, Self-Experimentation, Scientific Method”. Apart from reading his articles, you can find many interesting links and suggestions for further reading. I also suggest Scott Young’s blog, which is about much more than self-experimentation and offers clear thinking on many different topics.

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Using Audacity to learn Chinese (speaking and listening)

By On May 14, 2013 · 10 Comments · In Advanced, Beginner, Intermediate, Learning outside class, Listening, Recommended resources, Speaking

I have briefly mentioned that I use Audacity quite a lot (Recording yourself to improve speaking ability), but the more I use the software, the more I realise how awesome it actually is. Audacity is your best friend when it comes to recording yourself, mimicking others, manipulating recordings, managing media and recording things you aren’t supposed to record. It’s also free of charge and can be  installed on most operating systems.

In this article, I will introduce several useful functions and show how they can be used to learn (or teach) Chinese. However, this isn’t meant to be a manual of how to use Audacity, so even though I will show you how to do certain things, please refer to the official website for help and support. I’m a language teacher and learner, I learn only what I need to learn about the technical details.

Audacity can be found, read about and downloaded here: Audacity (official page at SourceForge)

The basics

audacityBefore we get into any details, let’s look at what Audacity is. This is from the official about page:

  • Record live audio.
  • Convert tapes and records into digital recordings or CDs.
  • Edit Ogg Vorbis, MP3, WAV or AIFF sound files.
  • Cut, copy, splice or mix sounds together.
  • Change the speed or pitch of a recording.
  • And more! See the complete list of features.

This is what we will look at in this article:

  1. Recording from any source
  2. Enhancing the recording
  3. Repeating or slowing down the audio
  4. Mimicking and recording
  5. Saving, editing, and exporting

This is a video I recorded of these six steps. It contains only sparse commentary, so read the rest of the article for more details. Obviously, you can do much more than this with Audacity, this is just a small demonstration.

Record from any source, record what you hear

Audacity can be set up to record anything you hear from your computer. This might be different depending on your operating system, but the general idea is to set Audacity’s input to “stereo mixer” or similar. WHen you press “record”, Audacity will register anything on your computer’s line out. Thus, if you find it hard to extract audio from a YouTube clip or from a movie you’re watching, use Audacity!

I use Linux and for me it’s a simple matter of changing the input settings in Audacity. If you use other operating systems, you can start here or simply search for “Audacity record playback” + [your operating system].

Audio recording enhancement

Apart from this, Audacity is your best friend when it comes to editing and manipulating recordings of various kinds. I sometimes record lectures or similar. I typically need two things to handle this kind of recording:

  1. Noise removal and compression
  2. Cutting and editing
  3. Automation

The first part is very complicated and I guess there are people who are actually earning their living from enhancing sound files, but we can do some basic but yet very effective things with Audacity. Noise removel is mostly a matter of trial and error, just use the function in the program and try different levels (the default ones to start with, obviously). Audacity’s compression function allows you to change the intensity of the recorded audio, removing high spikes and distributing the rest of the sound in a neat way.

Cutting and editing is fairly straightforward. Since you can actually see the audio, it’s a lot easier than trying to record from recordings or whatever else people do if they don’t know about Audacity or similar programs.

Automation is fairly complicated and I don’t know even a single percent of what there is to know, but I still want to point out that there is something called “chains” in Audacity that allows you to apply the same functions to any number of files. For instance, if you record twenty lectures in the same environment, you can use the same noise removal and compression settings for all files and you can apply these functions to all the twenty recordings with just one click. You can even make Audacity save the results as new files in the file format of your choice.

Using Audacity to mimic native speakers

Mimicking native speakers is one of the most powerful ways of acquiring good pronunciation in any language. However, it’s not always practical to do so. If we listen to a YouTube clip, the interface simply doesn’t allow us to repeat exactly what we want to repeat and even if we have a sound file, it would take ages to use a normal media player to be able to mimic a few minutes of speech.

In audacity, this is fairly easy:

  1. Import or record audio
  2. Select the part you want to mimic
  3. Click play and only the section you want to play will be heard
  4. If you hold down shift while clicking play, the section will repeat

This is useful because it isn’t very easy to mimic native speakers at their normal rate of speech, not even for advanced learners. Just listening to the same sentence a dozen times before even trying is good start.

The next step would be to record your own voice over the voice of the native speaker. After having practised until you can read a sentence or passage, simply hit record and Audacity will play the audio while recording your voice. You can the mute the original audio and evaluate your own recording. More about this below.

If you’re interested in either mimicking or the 蔣勳 clip seen in the video, I suggest you read Jacob Gill’s article about how he used that very same clip to improve his pronunciation (we did this at the same time, although I didn’t finish the entire clip and didn’t publish anything about the results).

Slow down the rate of speech without changing the pitch

Some media players can slow down the speed of the audio, but while doing so, the pitch also drops. Thus, we all sound like drunkards at half speed and like smurfs on illegal substances on double the speed. Audacity has a function called “change tempo”, which allows you to change the speed without changing the pitch. This allows you to slow down the rate of speech to a level you’re more comfortable with. Obviously, if you slow things down too much, you will get weird results.

Recording yourself

One very good way of improving your pronunciation is to record yourself. This fulfils several purposes at once:

  • You can share the recording for comments and feedback
  • You can listen to the recording yourself (this is actually very useful)
  • You can use it as a benchmark and see your improvements later

These concepts have already been discussed in more detail in other articles, namely Recording yourself to improve speaking ability and Benchmarking progress to stay motivated. However, there is one more aspect of recording yourself I think is worth mentioning:

How do you use audacity?

Do you have any favourite functions? Do you use audacity to learn or teach Chinese in a way that I haven’t mentioned here? Leave a comment!

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Adding tone marks (w/o Pinyin) above characters to practise tones

By On May 8, 2013 · 19 Comments · In Advanced, Beginner, Distinctively Chinese, Intermediate, Reading

When faced with a text presented in both Chinese characters and Pinyin, the eyes of most (Western) learners automatically focus on the familiar letters rather than the weird characters. This is true even for advanced learners such as myself. I suppose it’s because of the fact that I spent my first 25 years in life without seeing more than a handful of Chinese characters; it’s only natural that the Latin alphabet is more comfortable.

This is of course why textbook authors tend to remove Pinyin fairly quickly. They do so in different ways (gradually, suddenly, for a selection of characters, etc.), but they all do it. However, some textbooks (Practical Audio-Visual Chinese and New Practical Chinese Reader for instance) provide a cool combination, namely Chinese characters with added tone marks, but without any Pinyin.

The result looks like this:

diacriticsWhy this is useful to practise tones

It’s easy to understand why we want to get away from Pinyin and start reading characters as much as possible, but why is it useful to keep the tone marks? Isn’t that just a crutch that will actually stop us from learning “for real?” What about reasonably advanced students, do we really need tone marks?

If reading is your main goal, you’d probably right in thinking that you don’t need tone marks, but if the goal is to practise pronunciation, adding the tone marks makes a lot more sense. The reason is that reading aloud in Chinese is much harder than most people think (this will be the topic of an upcoming article). Therefore, if we want to practise one specific part of reading aloud (e.g. pronunciation), we need to decrease the work load a bit. If we introduce Pinyin, most students stop reading the characters altogether, but if we only have characters, it typically becomes too hard. Having the characters plus tone marks is the golden middle way.

In essence, producing correct tones when reading requires two things:

  1. Recalling the correct tones
  2. Pronouncing the correct tones

These are two completely different skills. Knowing which tone a character is supposed to be doesn’t mean that you can pronounce it, and being able to pronounce tone combinations doesn’t entail that you know how specific characters are read.

Adding tone marks above characters sidesteps the first skill and allows us to focus on the second, while still reading characters rather than Pinyin.

One way of getting the tone marks is to do it manually. This is time-consuming and if you’re not already an expert on text layout, it’s actually quite hard to do on a computer (on paper, you can obviously just write the tone marks, but that still takes quite a lot of time).

For the above-mentioned reasons, I wanted to find a way of doing this automatically. After having searched for various solutions and not finding anything useful, I finally posted a question on the Chinese Stack Exchange. After a while, Jens Jensen provided a solution that works very well and that works like this:

  1. Create a bookmark in your browser with the following URL/address (you can call it whatever you want):

    javascript:(function(){var i,t,ts,e,at;at=parseInt(prompt("Which row is the pinyin in?",1))-1;ts=document.querySelectorAll( 'table.textblock' );for(i=0;t=ts[i];i++){e=t.querySelectorAll('acronym')[at];e.innerHTML=e.innerHTML.replace(/\w*[āɑ̄ēīōūǖĀĒĪŌŪǕ]\w*/g,' ˉ ').replace(/\w*[áɑ́éíóúǘÁÉÍÓÚǗ]\w*/g,' ˊ ').replace(/\w*[ǎɑ̌ěǐǒǔǚǍĚǏǑǓǙ]\w*/g,' ˇ ').replace(/\w*[àɑ̀èìòùǜÀÈÌÒÙǛ]\w*/g,' ˋ ').replace(/[^ˉˊˇˋ ]+/g,' · ').replace(/ /g,' ');}})();

    diacritics2

  2. Paste your text into Jiang Long’s Pinyin Annotator (a great tool for other purposes as well, but we’re going to use it to generate Pinyin here).
  3. Choose what you’d like the annotator to output. To generate something like the example above, just use characters and Pinyin. Click annotate.
  4. Open the bookmark you created above and enter the correct row for Pinyin (1 if you’re using Pinyin/characters only) and your Pinyin output should be replaced by tone marks only.
  5. The format is somewhat awkward to copy to other documents, but I’ve found that if you save the page as a PDF file, you can then copy from that PDF file without problems.

Note: I’ve tried this in Firefox on Ubuntu and Windows 7 and both work well. I don’t know about other browsers, but it should work anywhere.

You should be able to turn this…

ddj1

Into this…

ddj2

Note that the annotator uses a dictionary, so tones will be based on entries in that dictionary. If a word doesn’t exist in the dictionary, the annotator reverts to character defaults, which might be wrong for the particular meaning you have in your text (the annotator colours characters with multiple pronunciations green). A huge majority of cases should be correct, though, at least if you’re using Mainland Chinese standards.

If you need to manipulate the tone marks manually, I suggest copying the text to another document and simply copy/paste whatever you need. However, I regard this as a learning tool, not a publishing tool. If you want to control everything in detail, you’ll need to look up Ruby annotation and see how that works in your layout environment.

Conclusion

I think it’s necessary to find different ways of decreasing the difficulty of reading aloud in Chinese. Using tone marks without Pinyin is one case of the importance of not trying to learn everything at once and instead keeping your focus on just a few things. Regardless of how you do it, eliminating some problems to be able to focus completely on others is a useful strategy for learning complex things such as pronunciation.

Update: Neutral tones are now replaced by dots rather than keeping the letters.

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Hacking Chinese meet-up in Taipei 2013-05-12

By On May 4, 2013 · Leave a Comment · In About Hacking Chinese

I’m almost through a busy period with mid-term exams and a gymnastics competition, and since I won’t stay in Taiwan long after the semester ends, the only opportunity for another meet-up this semester is before final exams and reports start piling up, i.e. now. The previous meet-up was a great success, at least in my opinion. Close to a dozen people showed up and we discussed learning Chinese an entire afternoon. Let’s do that again! This meet-up will also be held in a cafe somewhere close to the NTNU main campus (close to both 古亭 and 臺電大樓 MRT stations) in Taipei. For more (and updated) information, check the Facebook event here:

Image credit: flickr.com/people/tylerdurden/

Image credit: flickr.com/people/tylerdurden/

Hacking Chinese meet-up Facebook event (May 2013)

If you want to join, please let me know before next Friday (May 10th) to make sure that I can reserve table(s) for everybody. Join the Facebook event, leave a comment to this post or send me an e-mail. The meet-up has no fixed agenda and will be a relaxed get-together over lunch, tea or whatever you prefer. Language hackers in Taiwan, unite!

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You might be too lazy to learn Chinese, but you’re not too old

By On May 2, 2013 · 16 Comments · In Advanced, Attitude and mentality, Beginner, Immersion and integration, Intermediate

Children learn languages quickly and effortlessly, adults slowly and painfully. This is an idea I’ve seen or heard so many times that I feel it’s time to write something about it. The notion that children are better language learners across the board is simply wrong. Before we look at why this is relevant for us as Chinese learners, let’s discuss why adults are actually better language learners than children.

Children don’t learn their first language quickly and effortlessly

Image credit: sxc.hu/profile/LotusHead

Image credit: sxc.hu/profile/LotusHead

It takes many, many years for a child to learn his or her first language. Saying that it’s effortless is equally false, it’s just that we don’t remember how hard it was. I’ve studied Chinese for five years and I can promise you that my Chinese is far superior to the average five-year-old in most areas (I would probably lose when it comes to intonation).

That’s true even considering the fact that I’ve been doing many things that aren’t related to Chinese at all, such as writing articles for this website (in English), talking with friends and family (in Swedish) and so on. I have not experienced anything near the true immersion environment of a child. Learning a language is very hard, both for adults and children.

One reason that people believe that children learn faster is that much less is required of them. Adults who arrive in a new country are supposed to handle all aspects of a normal, adult life, which naturally demands a great deal in terms of language ability. We don’t demand the same kind of proficiency from children. We only increase the demands gradually as they grow up and learn the language. As adults learning a second language, we’re adults and children at the same time.

Children might also learn to perform very well in a limited set of situations and in certain contexts, which might lead others to (erroneously) think that their ability is as good in other areas as well. Adults are more likely to run into problems because they need to or want to express more complex ideas.

Adults are much smarter than kids

This shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone, but adults are much better at planning, analysing, executing, organising, deducing and so on. These are all skills that are very valuable when learning a second language.

Also, adults know a lot about the world that kids don’t. This means that we can often connect new words with things we already know, which is essential for any kind of learning. I can relate words and structures in Chinese to words and structures I know in other languages. This is of course only a crude form of scaffolding, but it definitely helps. If I see the word “progressive tax” in Chinese, I don’t need to learn what progressive tax is, I just need to learn how to say it in Chinese.

Hacking Chinese is of course a prime example of something that an adult language learner (myself) can do, but that a child cannot. I can observe and analyse my language learning and understand where I’m having problems and what to do about them. I can be systematic and plan my studying in an efficient manner. After five years of studying, my language level is apparently good enough to survive a master’s degree in teaching Chinese as a second language taught entirely in Chinese, mostly aimed at native speakers.

This obviously takes much, much longer for a child (the average age of my native speaking classmates is more like 25 rather than 5). Most people go through nine years of elementary school, six years of high school and then four years of university before they do that.

I don’t mean to say that my own language ability is as good as my classmates’, though, far from it. Very far indeed. But using a language successfully is about much more than just words, grammar and pronunciation. Language and thinking are closely linked, which is why the more mature mind of an adult reaches a mature language level much faster. We take lots of shortcuts that aren’t available to children.

What we should learn from children

Still, children do have certain advantages. For instance, they definitely reach a higher level in the long run, especially when it comes to pronunciation. As mentioned above, my ability to express myself in Chinese (both in speaking and writing) is of course superior to a five-year-old, but in the long run, Give the child another five years and I’m left far behind in terms of pronunciation and accent. The native speaker will also have a more natural sentence structure and a better grasp of everyday language.

The reasons for this are many and various. Some of these are biological (children really do learn words very quickly, for instance), but let’s focus on the things we can learn from. To start with, children have extremely strong incentives to learn. Humans are social beings that crave contact and affinity with other humans and this is mediated through language.

Thus, no child will think to itself “learning this language just isn’t worth it, let’s do something else”. Instead, they will try very hard to fit in socially, which includes the ability to communicate flawlessly. There is no way that a second language learner can have such strong incentives to learn Chinese, even though it might be possible to come close.

The lesson we can lean from this is that motivation is something we need to consider carefully. We need to find ways of studying that we find interesting, entertaining or important in some way.

Moreover, children are less socially conscious than adults, or, in other words, they have less face to save. A baby doesn’t care if it pronounces “lamp” incorrectly or gets the word order of a sentence wrong. Kids care more than babies, they are subject to peer pressure and so on, but they are still more willing to experiment than adults. This is something we should remember as second language learning adults. We have to accept that making mistakes is a natural part of learning. Indeed, making mistakes is learning. Adopting a more child-like attitude would do us good.

Children aren’t small adults

Way back in history, people tended to regard children as adults, but smaller. In the light of modern developmental psychology, this is of course nonsense. Children are simply different from adults. This means that arguments like “it works for children, therefore it should work for adults as well” are bunk.

This isn’t an argument against any particular method, but if anyone motivates their approach with this kind of statement, an alarm should go off in your critically thinking mind. That it works for children might mean that it doesn’t work for adults, for instance. Or it might mean nothing at all, because we’re comparing apples and oranges.

Adult learners, pronunciation and fossilisation

I think the most obvious example is pronunciation. Almost all children achieve very good pronunciation and a natural accent in languages they start learning early. Most adults who start learning a second language don’t achieve this. As I said earlier, children do learn pronunciation and accent to a higher level than adults do.

However, this is not only because they are children, but also because adults tend to have fixed ideas about certain things. Learning to speak a foreign language involves a shift in identity, a shift most people aren’t willing to make. The incentives are also different. People would find it very strange if someone pronounced words incorrectly in their first language and would exert social pressure on that person to change. This isn’t true for adult learners, especially not advanced ones. Communication is usually deemed to be enough. That is, I believe, the main reason adult learners don’t reach a native-like pronunciation.

Conclusion

Children learn languages neither quickly nor effortlessly. Adults have several advantages that allow us to learn more efficiently. It’s true that children achieve better pronunciation and accent, but I personally think this isn’t mainly because they are children, but because adults don’t care enough,  don’t receive enough feedback or don’t spend enough time.

So, no, you’re not too old. You might be too lazy, too close-minded or too busy, but you’re definitely not too old.

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Immersion at home or: Why you don’t have to go abroad to learn Chinese

By On April 24, 2013 · 7 Comments · In Advanced, Attitude and mentality, Beginner, Immersion and integration, Intermediate, Learning outside class

While most people claim that it’s essential to live in the country to learn the language, the fact is that this isn’t a prerequisite for reaching an advanced level. For instance, I have spent a total of two weeks in English-speaking countries and yet I think my English is quite okay. There are numerous examples of people who have attained high levels in various languages from home, which means that anyone saying that you have to go abroad to learn a language properly is simply wrong.

Image credit: sxc.hu/profile/nmedawar

Image credit: sxc.hu/profile/nmedawar

However, it’s obvious that people who study in China on average learn Chinese faster than people who don’t, so people who say that it’s important to go abroad (including myself) have a point. What’s going on here?

The answer is quite simple: Learning a language quickly is about immersion (or, expressed even more bluntly, the number of hours you put in), but this concept, while related to living abroad, isn’t synonymous with it. Let’s look at two cases to prove the point:

Why it’s harder to immerse at home

While you can immerse yourself in a foreign language in your own country, it is significantly more demanding to do so. You will meet with numerous problems, such as:

  • Your family and friends don’t speak the target language
  • People will think you’re weird if you go too far
  • You need to actively create an immersion environment yourself
  • There will be fewer spontaneous exposures to the language
  • You’re not being directly exposed to the culture
  • You don’t need to learn the language to fit in
  • It’s harder to diversify the immersion environment

The reason people tend to learn faster abroad is because it requires less effort

None of the above problems is insurmountable, they can all be overcome with strong determination and some creativity. And this is the key: the reason people learn faster abroad is because more of these things are done for them, and since humans are lazy by nature, it figures that people who go abroad learn faster. This doesn’t mean that you have to go abroad, though.

How to create an immersion environment at home

The main problem with immersion, especially if you’re learning Chinese, is that it’s hard to find immersion material that you can actually understand. It will take you some serious time to understand talk shows or radio programs. However, there are many things you can do before you reach that level. Let’s look at the five elements of language learning to see how you can succeed even while staying at home:

Listening

Speaking

Reading

Writing

Vocabulary

Taking courses and finding teachers

Remember that studying abroad or at home is completely unrelated to whether you’re enrolled in a formal course or not. You can find teachers both in your own country and in China. In fact, you can easily find teachers in China while staying in your own country. using services such as Live Mocha. More and more language schools have started to offer online tutoring as well.

Self-studying is a much more complex topic than there is room for in this article, so I have a series of articles on self learning planned and those will come online later as I finish writing them. In essence, regardless if you stay at home or go to China, you definitely need real people to talk to and direct feedback on your language, especially pronunciation. Learning a language from home is harder, but it’s not impossible.

Further reading

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Learning the right chengyu the right way

By On April 17, 2013 · 12 Comments · In Advanced, Beginner, Distinctively Chinese, Intermediate, Vocabulary

Ever since I started learning Chinese, I’ve heard people say that if I want to impress native speakers and show that I really know Chinese, the key is to learn chengyu (成语/成語). They are often presented as magic keys not only to the Chinese language, but also to the culture, the people, the philosophy and so on.

However, this approach has always irked me. The way chengyu are presented and taught is, in my opinion, flawed. In this article, I will share my own experience of chengyu and how I think they should be approached, both from a student’s and a teacher’s perspective. In case you’re not sure what a chengyu is, please read the article on Wikipedia.

My own experience of learning chengyu

Let’s look at a typical case (myself): Having heard that these idioms are the pinnacle of the Chinese language, as a student I want to learn as many as possible. I also find the stories behind the idioms interesting and there are lots of books written in English to explain these stories and the idioms they have created. When I try to use the idioms with native speakers, they are typically overjoyed that a foreigner has learnt these supposedly very hard phrases.

Then, after having learnt Chinese for many years, I figured out that most of this was wrong. Most of the chengyu I learnt were actually not that important and had a very limited usage (see below). When native speakers said it was cool that I used chengyu, it was more in a “oh, look, the foreigner is trying to use chengyu, how cute!” way. I don’t think I used many of those idioms in a correct way. I still don’t. Chengyu are much trickier than most students (and teachers) think.

For example, let me tell you about a little game I play when writing articles. I have a fairly good passive grasp of chengyu, so when I write articles, I often have an idea that there should be a chengyu that would fit in a particular sentence. I’ve come to see article writing as a boxing match: it’s me versus the idioms. When I use an idiom correctly, I score one point, when I use an idiom incorrectly or in a awkward way (as pointed out by a reliable native speaker), chengyu scores one point. I almost always lose. This is after having studied Chinese for many years and focusing quite a lot on writing.

In essence, I have three things to say about chengyu:

  1. Chengyu have a more limited use than you might think
  2. Always learn chengyu with a sentence
  3. You don’t actually need chengyu

Chengyu have a more limited use than you might think

The first thing you should know about chengyu is that they typically express a very specific concept. This concept is usually much narrower than the English definitions you will see next to it in a dictionary. Of course, this isn’t true for all chengyu; some even have very close counterparts in English (see this article on World of Chinese), but it is true in most cases.

If you have fully grasped the story behind the chengyu and its meaning, you might still get it wrong, because modern usage isn’t necessarily the same as it once was or native speakers interpret the story differently from you. You also need to grasp how the chengyu is used in a sentence. Is it used as a verb? A phrase perhaps? Both? Or it might just be the case that native speakers don’t use that chengyu very much at all.

If we take normal words and experiment by expanding their use to areas which we haven’t really encountered them in before, we will sometimes find that they work in this new context as well, sometimes we’ll find that they don’t. Through a mixture of negative and positive feedback, we slowly grasp how the words are used. When you experiment with words, you’ll be right a fair number of times, with chengyu, you will almost always be wrong.

The following drawing is a rough representation of what’s going on. The green circles represent correct usage and the white circles represent the learners understanding of that usage. If the circles overlap completely, the word or phrase has been mastered. As we can see, the process of learning words is mostly about adjusting the circles so that they match (of course, the size should vary too, but that would make the drawing very messy). For chengyu, though, the most significant difference between the circles is the size. Chengyu usually have a much more narrow usage than learners think.

Learning ChengyuThis leads me up to the second point.

Always learn chengyu with a sentence

The biggest mistake students (including myself) make is that they treat chengyu as normal words, which isn’t a good approach. Instead, learn each chengyu in a specific context. I don’t mean that you should just add an example sentence, I mean that you should learn the example sentence and the chengyu as one unit. Of course, the sentence should be a typical sentence that shows the way the chengyu is typically used.

In fact, some chengyu are only used to describe one specific thing, so if you know that one sentence, you’ve covered most of the uses of that chengyu! In other words, you should start from a very small circle and then slowly expand that if you find other examples of how that chengyu is used, rather than drawing a big circles and then gradually shrinking it. This will of course mean that you will use chengyu less, but you will at the same time avoid using them incorrectly most of the time.

My normal approach doesn’t work very well for chengyu

I’ve learnt most of my Chinese this way:

  1. Learn to understand something
  2. Read and listen a lot, pay attention
  3. Experiment and learn how to use what I already understand

This has worked very well for increasing all four skills in Chinese and I think this is a great method, provided that you spend enough time doing 2), which is where most people fail. Still, with hindsight, I realise that this method is horrible for chengyu. Yes, I can understand most of the idioms I encounter when reading, but I suck at using chengyu. This is because I thought of them as flexible building blocks rather than fixed expressions used to convey a very specific meaning.

You don’t actually need chengyu; they aren’t magic keys to anything

Chengyu are cool. I like the stories and I like the culture I gain access to through the stories, but saying that you have to be able to use lots of chengyu to get good at Chinese is simply wrong. Do you have to understand chengyu? Yes. Do you have to be able to use them? Not really. It’s perfectly possible to speak Chinese extremely well without using too many chengyu.

Your normal vocabulary, grammar and pronunciation matters much more than if you throw in a chengyu here and there. And remember, if you throw one in the wrong idiom, you’ll just show that you actually don’t know that much. As a beginner, it’s cool to be the cute foreigner doing his best, but that’s not so cool when you’re trying to grow up in Chinese and become an adult speaker.

Of course, if you’re Chinese is so good that it starts approaching an educated native speaker, you really have to start using chengyu correctly to really show your mastery of the language. You also can’t escape some common chengyus, both written and spoken. That’s not what I’m talking about here, I’m talking about the thousands of chengyu that pop up in books, articles and so on. Understand them, study them if you like, but do so because you’re interested and because you like it, not in a vain attempt to show off, because you’re most likely to shoot yourself in the foot.

If you don’t love chengyu, I suggest you learn the most common ones, especially those that can be used in a large variety of situations. The general rules is that if you hear a chengyu three times in different situations, it’s probably worth learning. An alternative is to check this article by Carl Fordham, who has gathered 20 chengyu that are actually useful. Never learn chengyu from huge lists you find on the internet.

A question of effiicency

The real reason I think people focus too much on chengyu is that the effort it takes to learn to use a chengyu is several times greater than the effort required to learn most normal words. Thus, you get much more value for the time you invest if you focus on high-frequency chengyu only and leave the rest for later. I’m not saying it’s bad to learn chengyu, I’m just saying that its not the best way to invest your time.

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The question you have to ask about your Chinese teacher or course

By On April 10, 2013 · 6 Comments · In Advanced, Beginner, Intermediate, Learning in class

Some students ask many questions, but fail to ask the really crucial ones. Some students don’t ask at all, but might be considering these questions anyway. In this article, I’m going to talk about the question that you have to ask yourself about your current Chinese program (or one you’re planning of enrolling in) and your Chinese teacher.

This question is fundamental one and many students overlook it, perhaps because they want to dive straight in “and learn some Chinese”. Most teachers will not encourage students to ask this question either, but I will. Here it is:

What will you not learn from this teacher/course?

Image source: sxc.hu/profile/cobrasoft

Image source: sxc.hu/profile/cobrasoft

For obvious reasons, the answer to this question isn’t usually introduced along with the syllabus the first time you attend class, and neither is it posted on the school’s website. Teachers won’t highlight their own weaknesses, schools won’t tell students what they won’t learn from attending their courses. If they do, that’s a very good sign indeed.

Most of the time, however, you need to consider this question yourself. This is about taking responsibility for your own learning. You’re the one who will suffer if anything goes wrong. The basic principle is to take your own long-term goals and compare them to the curriculum of your Chinese course/program. Don’t be fooled by the flowery language, look at the actual requirements. They will most likely not be the same as your goals.

For instance, some teachers will say that speaking is important, but yet only have written exams. This phenomenon isn’t limited to teachers, of course, which is why I’ve written an entire article about it here. It’s frighteningly common among teachers to be unaware of how their choices of examinations and assessments influence how students plan their learning.

Consider the course you’re in or want to enrol in

The factors you need to consider are of course many more than I can easily list here, but one of the most important one for language studies is the size of the class. If you’re after oral proficiency in Chinese and there are twenty students in each class, you can rest assured that speaking and pronunciation won’t be what you see the most of.

In fact, I have attended several classes that were called “conversational Chinese”, but turned out to be mostly about listening to the teacher and reading dialogues in a book. I would argue that class size is the most important factor when deciding where to go for Chinese classes.

Analyse your teacher’s capabilities and resources

In a perfect world, teachers would be able to teach you everything with ease and they would be provided with sufficient resources to do so. This isn’t the case, though. Native speakers sometimes struggle with explaining the grammar or pronunciation of their own language. Foreigners like me find it hard to teach open conversation classes because we lack sufficient “language feeling” (语感) to be able to say for sure whether a phrase sounds natural or not.

On the other hand, advanced second language learners know much more about the process of learning Chinese as an adult than most native speakers. Each teacher has his or her strengths and weaknesses. You need to figure out what they are and see how they tally with your own goals and ambitions. Naturally, this involves more than the teacher, because even the best teacher might have limited resources (especially time).

Take note of what you won’t learn

You’re unlikely to find someone who can provide you with everything you want in the way you want it. This doesn’t mean that you should quit your course or stop hiring a private tutor, it just means that you should take note of the things you won’t learn and make sure you learn them in some other way.

If you find out that your courses are very heavy on reading and listening, find people to talk with on your spare time. If you can’t understand your teachers corrections for your tones or your teacher don’t have time to correct you, hire someone to do it and practice on your own.

When learning something as complex as a language, we shouldn’t focus on everything at once anyway, so focus on what you think is most beneficial for you at the moment and try to find ways of reinforcing other areas later, perhaps with a different teacher or in a different program.

Hacking Chinese is one answer

The reason I launched Hacking Chinese in the first place is that I found that most teachers don’t tell students about how to learn, either because they don’t know (this is surprisingly common) or because they don’t have time (also a common reason, see the discussion about class size above).

Either way, Hacking Chinese is an attempt to fill this gap. I hope that through reading my articles and applying the principles behind them, you will become more independent and aware of your learning situation. Comparing what you want to achieve with what your courses and teachers will offer you is a good start!

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Want to master Chinese in no time? Start dreaming!*

By On April 1, 2013 · 12 Comments · In About Hacking Chinese

All serious learners face the same problem: Regardless how diligent we are and how efficient our studying is, there are only 24 hours in a day. This is a fact and there’s nothing we can do about it. Therefore, one cornerstone of learning a language quickly is to examine the time you have available and see how you can fit as much language learning as possible into your day without burning yourself out.

Image credit: sxc.hu/profile/vikush

Image credit: sxc.hu/profile/vikush

This is a process that requires both experience, diligence and a deep knowledge of oneself. Not only do you need to find out where you have time and how to use it, you also need to make sure you’re having fun, lest you’ll burn yourself out and end up giving up language learning altogether. There is a mechanical, analytical side to it which is tricky to master if you start from scratch. So far, I’ve written the following articles about this part of the process:

  1. The time barrel: Or why you have more time than you think
  2. Time quality: Studying the right thing at the right time
  3. Learning efficiently vs. learning quickly

However, it’s essential to remember the human side of it, which includes keeping track of your energy levels, making sure that you’re studying the right thing according to your current state. As mentioned above, you also need to have fund and actually enjoy what you’re doing. Studying isn’t only what’s going on in a classroom, it can be anything that helps you along the way toward Chinese mastery.

  1. Study according to your current productivity level
  2. Enjoying the journey while focusing on the destination
  3. Diablo 3 and Starcraft 2: Playing computer games in Chinese

Fortunately, I have some great news for you. For the past six months, I have conducted some pseudo-scientific experiments on my own learning. I can say for sure that the method I will describe below worked well for me, but I can’t guarantee that it will work for others (hence the pseudo). If I can convince my adviser, I will write my master thesis about this next year. This article is just a brief, personal summary to let you in on what I’ve been doing recently. Hopefully, it will also help you master Chinese faster.

Lucid dreaming

Before I get into the details of the method, I’d like to give you some background information. I started experimenting with lucid dreaming about five years ago. If you’re not familiar with lucid dreaming at all, it’s a kind of dream in which you are fully aware of the fact that you’re dreaming and your mind works very much like it does when you’re awake.

For instance, when you’re in a lucid dream, you know that you’re dreaming, you can think about things going on in the waking world (such as what you did yesterday or what you plan to do after you wake up). In fact, everything is pretty much like being awake, except the fact that you’re dreaming.

Now, this sounds pretty weird, but it has been scientifically proved several times. From a scientific point of view, the problem with lucid dreaming was that it was all based on people’s subjective memories of dreams. People saying that they were aware of dreaming and even being able to control their dreams doesn’t mean that it’s true. This changed in the 1970s. Perhaps the most famous experiment was conducted by Stephen LaBerge of Stanford University, who used a clever design to prove that lucid dreaming is a real phenomenon. The design was based on one used by Keith Hearne a few years earlier.

In their experiments, lucid dreamers were able to communicate with the scientists while they were dreaming (eye-movements in dreams match those that can be seen in people in REM-sleep). For instance, they agreed beforehand what up, down, right and left meant and the test subject was then able to communicate with the scientist using combinations of eye-movements.

Lucid dreaming is a skill that can be learnt. The process is relatively simple and involves several steps, such as first practising remembering dreams, then focusing on conscious awareness of dreams, then on controlling them. With some practice, it’s not hard to reach a level where you can have lucid dreams whenever you want to and be able to exert a high degree of control over the content of these dreams.

Lucid dreams of foreign language mastery

This is all very cool (at least I think so), but what’s it got to do with learning Chinese? I have spent some serious time looking into lucid dreaming and have learnt a lot (both in theory and practice). If you’re interested, I suggest you check out these forums: Dream Views, World of Lucid Dreaming.

Now, the really cool things started happening a few years ago when I started dreaming in Chinese. After waking up, I could remember what words and sentences I used in the dreams. I could even remember myself correcting my own grammar, and, upon waking, realising that my corrections were perfectly legit!

This only happened occasionally, though. The next step was to do this deliberately. I took up lucid dreaming again and started experimenting. Since I have already learnt Mandarin to a reasonably advanced level, it wasn’t really a good for testing this new method. Instead, I turned to Japanese, which I didn’t know much about when I started the experiment six months ago. I now know quite a lot of Japanese, but more about that later.

Input vs. output

It’s obvious that we can’t acquire new information when dreaming. As far I know, there is no way of communicating with someone who is in a lucid dream (or a normal dream for that matter), so you can’t just put a recording of Chinese sentences on play next to your bed and hope to learn them while sleeping. However, we can still practise speaking (and perhaps writing) while asleep.

Stephen Krashen has argued that output is the result of learning rather than learning itself. I think this is true, but only up to a point. He’s right that we don’t actually learn many new things by speaking, but I do think it’s fairly obvious that the only way to become fluent is by using that which we already know and becoming really good at it. Fluency isn’t necessarily about knowing a lot, it’s about being able to use what we have smoothly and efficiently.

Enter: Lucid dreaming. What if you could have several extra hours of practice everyday without removing time from any of the other projects you’re working on? This won’t teach you new words, but you can still review and master sentences you already do know. For instance, you can practice talking about specific topics (either prepared or unprepared). You can also go through and review things you’ve learnt recently. You can practice for oral exams or presentations.

However, you won’t receive any reliable input. There might be Chinese native speakers in your dreams, but they are only constructs of your own mind. Their Chinese ability is limited to your own ability. There might be something cool buried here if it turns out that you subconsciously know more Chinese than you can actually produce. Thus, the native speakers in your dreams might actually be better at Chinese than you are when you’re awake.

The experiment

As I said above, I used Japanese for this experiment to make sure I entered into unknown territory (I knew about ten words in Japanese before this experiment). If you want to try this, you can of course do it with any language. There should be many variations of this experiment, this is just a brief summary of what I did. The most basic form of practice is reviewing sentences and it was the first experiment I did:japanese300

  1. Study a few sentences in the target language
  2. Review them once before going to bed
  3. Practice using them while in a lucid dream
  4. Try to create interesting and entertaining contexts
  5. Repeat

I tried this with a normal Japanese phrase book I picked up in a second-hand bookshop close to where I live. After going through a few iterations of the above process, I reached a stage where I could read a few phrases I had never seen just before going to bed, and then review and use those sentences while sleeping. Upon waking up, I was able to remember most of the sentences.

This is a skill that takes time to learn. This is what my progress looked like (it took me a while to learn the lucid dreaming part of the experiment, so the actual Japanese part only started seriously a month ago):lucidlearning

As you can see, I increased the number of phrases to learn incrementally (5, 8, 12, 20) and recorded the results. For practical reasons, I wasn’t able to do this every night, but all twenty experiments were carried out in roughly forty days. After the initial learning phase, I reviewed old patterns and words on a less systematic basis (while dreaming, of course), but a test I did last week shows that I remembered 178 out of the 225 sentences I tried to learn. This is after spending five to ten minutes each night just before going to bed, the rest of the time was spent while dreaming (hard to measure).

Now, the important thing here isn’t that I didn’t learn these sentences just passively. Since I have spent considerably amount of time actually using the sentences I know them very well by now, just as if I had spent that amount of time using them “in real life”. Obviously, I receive no feedback on my pronunciation, but if I really want to learn Japanese, I’ll get that from a tutor.

Sort of speaking to yourself, but not really

Now, sceptics might say that this is the same as repeating what you have learnt to yourself. And you’d be (mostly) right. However, repeating what you have learnt during the day while you’re sleeping in a manner that allows you to remember it the next day is incredibly useful and has huge potential. I’m just scratching at the surface here.

There is another difference between this method and speaking to yourself, though. If you sit down in front of your desk and read phrases in a foreign language, you will get bored fairly quickly. If you can create an interesting dreamscape and use the phrases in real situations, it will be much more fun. Research has shown clearly that we’re more likely to recall things we have learnt if the learning situation matches the recall situation. Thus, if we practice asking the price of a cup of coffee in a café, it will be easier to recall that phrase while in a café compared to when scuba diving.

So yes, it’s a bit like talking to yourself, but I think there’s more to it than that. Even if it’s just like talking to yourself, you can still practice fluency and review what you have learnt throughout the day, without spending more of your precious waking time.

Towards a more lucid future

I will continue to do research in this area. If you’re interested in participating, let me know! It would be useful if you’re already familiar with lucid dreaming and have reasonable control of your lucid dreams already. If not, that’s okay too, but rather than asking me for beginner help, I suggest you head over to the two forums I linked to above.I used guides there to get started many years ago and I know that they work.

Once you’ve learnt the basics, I’ll gladly take you on as a student (read: disciple). I haven’t decided on a price yet, but since this is quite unique and will help you tremendously, people who apply should be prepared to compensate me for the time I have invested. Like most other schemes, I might then increase the price for each subsequent level and once you’ve earned the grandmaster diploma (for a small fee), you’ll be able to recruit your own disciples (read: minions) and earn more mo… spread the gosp… eh… I mean, you will be able to spread this wonderful new learning method to other students for mutual benefit and prosperity of mankind!

April Fool’s Day: This article was published on April Fools’ Day and even if I wish that the method I write about here would work for real, it’s actually nonsense. However, it’s still an interesting thought-experiment and most of the content is real. Lucid dreaming is real, quite easy to learn (at least it was for me) and is truly fascinating. The only part that is bogus in this article is the experiment with learning Japanese.

Why doesn’t the method work, though? I haven’t actually tried it, but there would be several problems:

  1. It takes too much time to learn how to control dreams in the first place
  2. You would learn more if you just spent the time studying the language instead
  3. Memories of dreams fade quite fast, even though practice helps a lot
  4. You can only practice what you already know, so it would be a very limited tool indeed
  5. There are more interesting things to do in dreams than learn languages

Still, an interesting thought experiment. If I ever decide to spend more time with lucid dreaming, I will explore language learning in dreams more. I don’t think it will be very useful, but it might still be interesting. Until then, the whole enterprise of learning languages while dreaming remains just that, a dream.

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Is your flashcard deck too big for your own good?

By On March 26, 2013 · 18 Comments · In Advanced, Intermediate, Learning outside class, Organising and planning, Vocabulary

I didn’t use spaced repetition software for my first year of learning Chinese (I didn’t know what it was back then). During my second year, I sort of developed my own spaced repetition system. This is crazy when I think back, but I actually kept stats for vocabulary manually and tried to figure out how long I could wait with the next review while still not forgetting too much. Then I found out that there are programs that do that for all words individually, which was a relief. Reinventing the wheel (at least a good wheel) is both difficult and time consuming. If you want to read about what spaced repetition is and why you should use it, check this article.

Building my personal dictionary

Image credit: Patrick Correia

Image credit: Patrick Correia

Since then, I have recorded most of my learning in my deck of flashcards. At an early stage, I started recording other things than just vocabulary. For instance, if someone told me about the difference between two near-synonyms, I would record the difference on both their cards. If I found relationships to other characters that weren’t obvious, I added that bit of information as well. Later, when I started using Chinese-Chinese dictionaries, I added definitions in Chinese along with more etymology and other information I picked up along the way. My deck now consists of roughly 21,000 cards, some of them have small essays written on them.

Now, one of the basics of flashcard learning is that you shouldn’t add more information than necessary. Information that can be broken down should be broken down. However, the purpose with recording information about grammar, usage and cultural aspects isn’t necessarily to memorise this information, but to record it. This way, I can search through my deck and look up things I’ve looked up before. This is an invaluable resource I use all the time, especially when writing.

Big flashcard decks mutate and start living a life of their own

Then I read about people who nuked their decks, wiped everything and started from scratch. I was horrified; sacrilege! Some time passed and the discussion about deleting flashcard decks and starting over kept nudging me. At first, I thought: What if I lose any important words? What if I encounter a word I have learnt, but forgotten again because I deleted my deck? Then I rrealised that there is quite a bit of sense in the argument to start over again as well.

This article is the result of my own analysis of the situation.

In essence, this is why you might want to consider nuking your decks and start over:

  • You have lots of cards you don’t really need
  • You spend too much time with the deck (it has become a burden)
  • You no longer need to study the way you studied as a beginner

The first point isn’t relevant for everybody, but it is for me. I have (or had, I will come to that later) hundreds of cards which were very rare (i.e. not in common use at all). These came from various word lists and from my own attempt to add more words to learn specific characters. Getting rid of all these words that just drained time and energy without actually giving anything back is one good reason to delete your deck and start over, especially if these cards are draining both time and energy.

The second point is only relevant for people who spend too much time with computer programs instead of actually being exposed to the real language (reading or listening) or using it (speaking and writing). This topic is really too big for this article, but even though I think spaced repetition software is great, it’s a tool that you use to accomplish certain goals, it’s not a comprehensive method of language learning. Thus, this kind of studying should take up only a small part of your learning time.

The third point is very interesting and should be relevant for most people. In essence, we need different kinds of knowledge for different stages in our language learning. I deliberately focused a lot on recognition in the beginning simply because I believe that understanding is the most important aspect to enable me to learn more and interact with Chinese people. However, the goals I had five years ago don’t really match my current goals, so something needs to be done.

Reasons why you shouldn’t start again from scratch

However, there are compelling arguments against starting over. If you haven’t reached a level where you can read and listen to Chinese produced for native speakers, you run the risk of severely hampering your vocabulary acquisition. We use spaced repetition software in the first place because it’s such an efficient way of increasing vocabulary quickly. If you can read novels and listen to the radio, you don’t need spaced repetition to maintain common words and characters, that will come automatically. The same is true if you use Chinese to a large extent in your everyday life.

However, if you rely on textbooks and graded readers (which there are all too few of), deleting your deck means that you risk forgetting a lot of words you don’t see and hear naturally in your textbooks or in class. The fact that you don’t see or hear them doesn’t mean they aren’t necessary or common, it just means that you don’t see or hear enough words. In this situation, I strongly advise you against nuking your decks and starting over again. If you feel that your exposure to Chinese is enough to allow this, you can consider starting over.

The second reason you shouldn’t start over is if you have built up a personal dictionary. I keep my cards not only because I want to remember them, but because I want to be able to look things up. Rather than keeping notes about grammar and so on in a separate file or on paper, I keep it in my flashcard deck. Destroying the deck would destroy the dictionary. In theory, of course, it would be possible to keep the old deck as a dictionary only, but in practice, keeping two major decks for learning Chinese is bound to create problems.

The alternative to deleting is to actively trim and modify the deck

In the end, after long and serious consideration, I decided to keep my deck. This means that I have to handle all the problems listed above, including the one I haven’t discussed yet (the one about changing needs). Your situation isn’t likely to be the same as mine, so your conclusion might be different. If you decide to keep your deck, here are some ways you can deal with the problems I mentioned above.

You have lots of cards you don’t really need

This might be a major problem, depending on how many of these cards you have and if you keep forgetting them or not (it’s more likely since they by definition aren’t commonly used and therefore harder). I solved this by paying a native speaker do go through cards with an interval less than one year and highlight any cards that didn’t meet my requirements.

I then checked this list with a few other people and decided which to delete. I ended up deleting about 300 cards, which was much less than I thought. On the other hand, my requirements to delete a word was basically that it wasn’t in use in modern Chinese and that most educated native speakers wouldn’t use it in either speaking or writing. Still, 300 cards is still a lot considering that I kept forgetting them. Time adds up.

You spend too much time with the deck

This of course depends on how much time you actually spend. I spend around 20-30 minutes per day reviewing vocabulary and considering that I’m spending several times that amount on reading and listening. According to the time log I made last week, I spent roughly 67 hours with Chinese in some way or another, which means that I spend only about 1/20 of my time on vocabulary. I don’t think that’s too much.

Also, all the easy cards in your deck don’t take up as much time as you think. A rough calculation tells me that I spend around two minutes a day reviewing the 10,000 easiest card in my deck. Two minutes! It’s definitely worth that to refresh my memory and catch words I have forgotten.

You no longer need to study the way you studied as a beginner

This is perhaps the most important reason for starting over. In the beginning, I focused heavily on recognition, because I believe that being able to understand spoken and written Chinese is by far more important than being able to use it. Usage comes gradually, but massive exposure is a prerequisite for any kind of advanced level. My goal was to be able to handle native material as quickly as possible. However, once that goal is reached, it no longer makes much sense to focus heavily on recognition.

Instead, I wanted to put the emphasis on output, on correct usage and on expanding my active vocabulary. For this, cloze tests or recall is much more effective. Of course, when I see a new word, I determine whether or not it’s enough to understand it or if I want to be able to use it as well. If the former is the case, I still do recognition only, if the second is the case, I usually use cloze tests.

The reason nuking your deck isn’t helpful here is that you might as well do the same thing with your old deck. What I do now (and will probably keep on doing for many years) is to simply switch cards from recognition to cloze. When I review, I mark all cards I come across that I realise that I really should be able to use, but actually can’t. I then reset their intervals and change the card to cloze.

It’s not the size that matters

As we have seen, the size of the deck itself isn’t very important, but the time you spend working with vocabulary is. If you add up to tens of thousands of words over many years, you’re not likely to feel that a large deck is a burden, because most of the cards in it will be very easy. The reason you still want to keep them is that you will forget some easy words sometimes and it’s not worth the effort figure out which. If a card appears once every seven years, you wast more time thinking about whether you should delete it or not than you would reviewing it if you kept it in the deck.

However, I do think there are times when you should start over. If your deck is a mess, takes too much time and is boring to play with, you risk burning yourself out anyway and restarting might be a good idea. Similarly, if you have thousands of flashcards of a type you no longer need, deleting them is a good idea (a kind of selective reset). Furthermore, if you think flashcards are very useful but not fun, you should only use it for things that really matter, so keeping the deck small is important.

In the end, it boils down to what you use your deck for, how you use it and what you think about the way you’re currently studying. I didn’t delete my deck because I figured I could achieve the positive effects simply by being more trigger-happy with the delete button and finding other ways of removing unnecessary words. The key point isn’t exactly how you do it, but if you want to maintain a healthy attitude towards spaced repetition software, you need to have an active attitude to your deck. It’s a tool. If it doesn’t work, change it.

More about spaced repetition software on Hacking Chinese

  1. Spaced repetition software and why you should use it
  2. Anki, the best of spaced repetition software
  3. Spaced repetition isn’t rote learning
  4. Vocabulary in your pocket
  5. Diversified learning is smart learning
  6. Dealing with tricky vocabulary: Killing leeches
  7. Answer buttons and how to use SRS
  8. Measurable progress is a double-edged sword
  9. You can’t learn Chinese characters by rote
  10.  Towards a more sensible way of learning to write Chinese
  11. Is your flashcard deck too big for your own good? (this article)
  12. If you think spaced repetition software is a panacea, you are wrong

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