I have been on this platform for some time, but progress is slow; the more I try to use it, the harder it gets for some reason. I boiled it down to the fact that rawdogging learning characters for 2 years has become counterproductive. I have had some months of inactivity here and there, but I find it hard to build up my motivation to get back into the game, or keep doing my lessons.
The biggest question, of course, is how motivation is gained or lost, and I believe I narrowed it down to a few things. Not putting my knowledge into context, mnemonics being hard, and the SRS algorithm not prioritizing words.
Not putting my knowledge into context
The biggest realisation I had that may explain my lack of progress is partially due to not investing in putting my knowledge into direct context. I believed the claims of others saying they learned thousands of characters in a few months. So that made me think I should just try to really focus on studying characters and components, and totally forget about words or sentences in the beginning, or how language is used in practice. But it then becomes a very mechanised, quite repetitive and boring process of studying characters with SRS.
My SRS on HH only seems to reiterate characters and components; I can’t remember the last time it trained a word with me. I think this kind of reinforced the idea for me that I don’t know anything yet, even though with the 400+ characters I know, I can already read basic HSK 2 texts.
Mnmonics only teach a narrow part
And even now that I do know 400+ characters, I get thrown off the bus if someone says a simple Chinese phrase to me; I can’t speak, I can’t really hear or write. Because all effort has gone into silent character repetitions in my head, associating characters with strange mnemonics which then relate to sounds. I may know the pinyin mapping, but when I hear it in practice, I have a hard time getting back to that meaning or what the character looks like.
Mnmonics are sometimes a bit out there on HH
Even though I love HH, I do feel the mnemonics sometimes are a bit awkward; I don’t seem to easily remember the relations in the story.
[shu-] Sherlock is in the [4] bathroom of the [-_] house and the tile floor is covered with 米 rice, investigating a peculiar case. He stands in the corner as he tries to determine the 数 number of 米 rice grains on the floor, thinking that the 数 number may contain a clue as to why the 米 rice is there. A 女 woman is next to him, near the door, crying hysterically at the fact a large 数 number of precious 米 rice has been stolen and scattered across the tile floor. There are also a 数 number of 攵 foreman walking around the bathroom, trying to find clues as to who did the 米 rice crime
Like here: rice crime, women, foremen, counting rice — quite a complete scene going on with many various elements.
[bi-] Bigfoot is in the [4] bathroom of the [-an] pawn shop, helping them repair their toilet. 亻 Slenderman, who works there, pulls out a 日 sun from his pocket to help illuminate things, which is quite 便 convenient. Bigfoot finishes the repairs, but notices his hair has fallen all over the 一 ground. A walking broom comes in and 便 conveniently sweeps it up.
Here there are quite a lot of elements to remember: sun out of pocket, which for some reason is convenient, then hair all of a sudden shedding, then a walking broom coming in… I find it hard to memorize all those small parts that would never ever happen in correlation to each other.
[ji-] Jimmy Neutron is in the [3] basement of the [-ao] barn where he is trying to invent a walking 脚 foot. He gets a live 厶 elbow that he ordered (it still has a 卩 postage stamp on it) and covers it with 月 moon 土 soil and zaps it with his ray gun. Poof! It turns into a 脚 foot that then hops around the basement, knocking over some of the milk bottles.
Inventing a walking foot by ordering a live elbow (with a poststamp on it), covers it with 月 moon 土 soil and zaps it with his ray gun … So many elements that are so separate from each other but somehow make a story that makes a little bit of sense in the context of Jummy Neutron.
Anyhow, those are random examples, but often a lot of those mnemonics are quite complicated, with basically a whole scene going on with many different moving elements and unrelated facts coming together to form this scene. Maybe I do lack quite some creative imagination, and this method is failing on me a bit, but I also feel like mnemonics are not that vivid and random to me.
Maybe because it’s because the mnmonics are not created by my self?
…
Anyways, moral of the story, I know mnemonics were not a 1 size all solution, but I also felt it promised me quick gains and rewards for time spent. I spent months learning, then months trying to push through boring repetition without reconsidering whether I should maybe do something else aside from learning characters.
I usually do not learn more than 15 minutes a day, so it was like one SRS session, sometimes combined with new learnings. But especially after the 400+ mark, I spend all my time in SRS sessions; I rarely get to learn anything new. My backlog is just to big now, and I can’t seem to keep up. And now that I’m stuck in just repeating characters and components, I find it incredibly hard to get my dopamine from this and to enjoy learning. This just makes me forget or be consistent in doing repetitions.
I know that 15-20 minutes is too little for good language learning, but I hoped this was enough to gradually learn characters; that turned into isolated learning behavior, which I am moving away from now.
I will now invest more time into actually trying to read simple texts, listening to videos, or learning songs. Maybe I find out that by doing that I actually learn characters more naturally instead of ‘rawdogging’ them.
Am I the only one feeling like this or is it more common? And if HH/mnmonic approach has worked for you, what would you say was the defining approach that really helped you? Was it like putting in more time, effort?..
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