Okay Iāve decided to try making one of these to get some much needed feeling of accountability : P
I started HanziHero I think in October last year while i was on an exchange semester in Taiwan. But when I got back in February I lost all my study motivation. So at the start of this week when i got back into it i had over 1700 reviews waiting for me.
But since i have come back from worse in my Wanikani days : P so this does not deter me from trying!
I am now down to 1300 after committing to 30 min of hanzihero everyday so as long as i keep at it it should naturally come down to a more normal amount. I also decided to only learn new words, no characters, until itās in the 500 or less range again. This way the words will help me remember the characters but my new character workload will not increase.
My motivation to learn Chinese came back when started watching the word of honor/å±±ę²³ä»¤ on Netflix. Every time someone said a word or a sentence i could understand i would repeat it out loud and try to pronounce it like the actors and it was kind of really fun so my study motivation came back.
These burst of months long motivation and then a few months of no motivation for one specific thing is very normal for me. I tend to cycle through my interests which is not a bad thing cause i have a lot of them and i canāt do them all at the same time anyway. Buuut languages are one of those things where you really have to put in consistent work to get better so Iām trying to be better about it!
Sadly my Mandarin is very far from good enough to learn from just observing like i do with English or even Japanese while watching youtube.
Iāll use this here to update about how i am doing coming back from my 1700+ reviews : P (maybe it can motivate people in the same situation in the future)
On Day 7 of the Comeback Iām at 1317
Day 9 of the Comeback and Iām at 1178 Reviews!
Slow but steady progress.
I also finally got my painting supplies out again and having abo at Chinese landscape painting again. Which is not related to studying the language but motivates me to interact with the language more!
I took an art class at NTNU in Taiwan about Chinese landscape painting and itās so much fun getting back into it now.
I also started a list of all the 4 character idioms I encounter while studying or consuming mandarin media
Day 11 I got so excited to get below 1000 that i put in an hour instead of 30 min haha and i am now at 992 reviews ^^
Also a painting from when we went outside to Daan forest park in Taipei to do some live sketching and then later refined the sketch back in the classroom.
This was from October last year and i think itās still my favourite ink painting I did so far, just sad that I dropped a bit of ink water on it while finishing it
( I sadly donāt have a better camera so itās not super high res )
I wonder how long it takes to develop a steady hand, especially depending on how youāre doing the live sketching. From the bit Iāve read some say itās about ābuilding confidenceā in your lines ā committing to the full stroke. That, and using your arm rather than wrist (this still doesnāt make sense to me motor-wise )
To help break down the backlog a bit more (and keep up motivation) we just added a daily review limit setting. ā hopefully thisāll help in chunking your review backlog and feeling accomplished for hitting your currently daily target of ~30mins
It takes as long as drawing or painting in general takes. If you already paint in other mediums that part is transferabler. The arm rather then wrist thing is a thing all art teachers around the globe tell you all the time haha.
This is what is unique to this way of painting according to our teacher. The brush texture and stroke should make the detail and portray your emotions and what not. Itās kinda hard to give up the control over the details and let the brush do itās thing. The hard part is that the brush needs to be super dry for that, but have just enough pigment and water.
Day 14 review comeback update Iām at 823 reviews. I might be able to get back to learn new characters in a week ^-^
Iām not limiting myself to a number of reviews but rather on a minimum time frame and if i am motivated i just let myself continue for a bit longer. This has been working well for me over the last 2 weeks.
Day 16 I am now at 685 reviews
I am now a 1000 reviews below my starting point (at around 1770)
So from my self experiment iād say, it takes 30 to 60 min everyday for a little over 2 weeks to get down from a 1000 reviews.
And now i feel like the hanzi reading center in my brain is activated again and all the characters i have learned before are coming back to me when i encounter them outside of hanzihero as well. So even if one seems to forget them at one point they come back fairly quickly ^^
It just seems difficult to develop, especially as someone who only uses the wrist to write the majority of words (and even then handwriting is being antiquated in day-to-day use)
Thisāll be a nice datapoint to point to if others ever come with the same question
Day 23 (I think?) I am at 579 but probably not done for the day.
Itās Sunday and the new SRS beta means I wonāt have 200 reviews back tomorrow if I keep going a bit longer.
I am thinking about upping my daily new lessons to 10 from the pervious 5 that I have been doing during this review recovery period. My setting is still on 20 per day but I just do 5 of them everyday. Which means for now I only get words no new characters. I thought this was a smart way of helping with learning the characters without adding any completely new information to the mix, considering the amount of information going into my brain to begin with. But if I up it to 10 I would get 3 new characters a day as well.
Iāve been stagnating a bit over the last few days cause I had an important seminar talk to hold for university and it involved not only giving a 45 min talk about a math heavy* complicated physics topic but also listening to 7 other talks about similarly hard topics that I have never encountered before.
So I was to exhausted to put in more than a minimum of time into Chinese
(*for me at least cause it involved topology. Pls donāt come for me mathematicians, I am just a poor physics student trying to somehow get my masters degree T_T )
You could adjust the number of words to be 10/10 as well ā that is, until you run out of words to learn. In fact, I see now how the daily word limit documentation is outdated ā I filed an issue to update that
Do you have to give a review/synopsis of the other talks?
Day 25??? i think i messed up the count previously cause i started this thread at Day 7 on may 12th
Iām at 385 reviews
Almost at a normal level of reviews again, normal for me meaning 200 or below.
I set my lessons to 20 and my word lessons to 15 so i am learning 15 words and 5 new characters a day now. If i run out of words i will go down with the lesson count and put the words to the recommended level.
No but we got graded on the questions we asked after the talks -.-
And i still have to write a 10 page summary of my own talk.
I had an unexpected free day due to flooding and being stuck at a friends house a few hours away from home. So no university today and i did all the 380 reviews i had.
Tomorrow 160 will be back but for today it is ZERO ^^
I think at some point now i can say the comeback from my 1700+ reviews is complete.
My goal is to have 100 reviews a day.
I also set my lessons to the regular setting of 10 a day and my word count to 7.
I feel i have the capacity to learn new characters now.
Did you guys change this to give us the words for the characters faster? You must have, i just havenāt read through all the updates.
Cause i feel like i now remember characters so much faster cause i get them in the context of words earlier
We did for the current default experience. In addition, thereās a setting whichāll allow you to unlock related words even faster which you can preview ā hereās the docs
<3 I am enjoying this new default a lot. I donāt think i need them faster the current default seems pretty perfect for my brain.
Ever since i came back from all the reviews i am super motivated and hyped for doing hanzihero every day i do it right after breakfast in the morning.
It literally motivates me to get out of bed, cause i get to know more new characters. I put my settings back to 20 lessons a day cause i am feeling motivated ^^
This surprised me a bit cause this motivation seemingly comes from nowhere since i am not in a mandarin writing country anymore o.O
But Iāll ride it as long as it lasts. I know it will vanish at some point so better make use of it now : P
It might be because itās a task where i know exactly what to do and i canāt fail at it.
I just start the computer and then do all the reviews and then all the lessons. And then this is a successful completion of the task no matter how many words i got wrong. Compared to my university work this is very nice.
I like to analyze how my brain works and learns new things.
Does anyone else have the same observation or maybe the opposite? That itās more like a chore to you?
Or maybe someone has figured out how to make other tasks and study session have a similar feeling of success without option of failure?
How oneās attention works is an interesting topic for sure ā coincidentally been thinking about the same things
I think this is a big reason why one may find doing flashcards enjoyable ā a certainty of progression is another way to put it. When one feels confident that what theyāre doing is working, they can shut off their brain and focus, which may interestingly enough make the studying enjoyable. Because you then allow yourself to access states of flow or one could possibly label it as ē”ēŗ wu wei ā both have the properties of quieting of the mind.
simply that the sage ādoes not occupy himself with the affairs of the worldā.
Itās very easy for our minds to be constantly running the typical way to quiet the mind is through meditation, but the mind also quiets itself when you devote yourself toward some objective/end, or you become a master in some art
The paradox of studying is how one is of course interested in the end objective, but if you get your mind right, the most enjoyable aspect is the studying itself
Is there already a thread somewhere with new English words one learns through hanzi hero ?
Cause especially non natives probably encounter new words in English while doing HanziHero.
In my wanikani days I even learned a new German word!!! The English word was āplutocratā and i looked up the German and it was āPlutokratā so then i looked it up in an a German dictionary to find out what it means. It has since found itās way into my native vocabulary and i use it in discussions etc.
The English words i remember learning through hanzihero so far are ācartilageā and ātrellisā and more recently āincumbentā.
If there is already a thread were people collect those Iād be super interested in reading everyoneās new word encounters ^^ Otherwise Iāll make one : P
also learning and knowing multiple languages is weird cause my brain just thought this sentence: "what is āćććććŖć"in Chinese?ā like an English sentence asking what a Japanese word is in Chinese ā¦ I am German.
I think the language center in my brain stopped working please send help!!!
But also if you know how to say and use ćććććŖć in Chinese. Iād be glad for an example sentence!
(Cause there is like multiple words for maybe and i am searching for the same feeling?!)
Iāve had a very similar experience! Iām a Spanish speaker, so words with Latin roots like cartilage tend to be easy, but I also hadnāt encountered trellis or bask before. My impression is that words referring to concrete objects are in general more difficult than the ones referring to abstract ideas, although that may be exactly the opposite for a German speaker. Gall bladder, mildew or eaves are other words I also had to look up in the dictionary.
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which you can preview ā 