Norm's Study log! 🫣 - 天天很多练习！

[normau]

I’ve been at it for a while and have rarely missed a day of reviews.
There were periods where i rushed through adding characters and maybe even abused the “UNDO” button during reviews, BUT I’ve finally got a good system to learn 20 new items a day and actually learn the words I keep getting wrong.

up until this point, I rarely used the Mnemonics. mostly because i had studied mandarin in college (10 yrs ago) and have a lot of familiarity with the first 2 HSK levels. but now in hsk 3, i’m finding they are incredibly helpful and honsetly necessary.
I take every new character and paste the mneumonic in ai for image generation. and make sure i have it memorized for each new character.

I also do this for any characters that i ‘know’ but keep struggling to get completely right with no effort during reviews.

after i learn new items, i try and do the practicee review of them at least three times a day, including the last three days of new items. This lets me go fast, and fail fast without being concerned about having an item demoted.

I lean on the mental model of the mnemonic story heavily for recall until i just naturally don’t. usually happens after 3 real reviews.

The way HH introduces new words using the new characters is extra helpful in locking everything into memory. so i stick to the plan now and let HH feed me when and in what order to learn.

right now i have anywhere between 80 to 120 daily reviews, and i just switched the review order to be ‘easiest first’. I’m curious if it helps me finish daily reviews faster given that i can easily knock the number down earlier in the day and then with less left it’s less intimidating to lock in and finish.

The way i do my reviews is in chunks throughout the day. and whenever i ‘wrap-up’ a chunk, i make sure i re-review (practice) the ones i got wrong until i get all of them right.

Also, I do a lot of other apps(rosetta stone, duolingo, pimsleur, youtube, bilibili, rednote) everyday and also have a preply tutor who lives in chengdu. i meet with her for 2 hours every week.

My listening skills are near zero. I need a lot of help there but I’m hoping learning more vocab rapidly will slowing solve that problem. I’m betting that if i can learn enough vocab to make reading more material more approachable, then as I read my minds inner Chinese voice will grow stronger and maybe my listening comprehension will improve.

[jantje]

the inner voice stuff isnt going to work. if you want to improve your listening skills, you have to listen more its really that simple. id strongly suggest you to stop paying for the instructor, stop using rosetta stone, duolingo and pimsleur and instead spend that same money on netflix, viki, disney+, iqiyi, youtube premium etc… any of these services and just watch whatever you like. its going to take hundred of hours minimum before you can understand native speech even if you pre-studied 50k words, so might as well just start today.

[akitak9821]

Kind of building on @jantje 's comment, you don’t really have to pay for so many things. Additionally, I personally have found that you’ll grow your listening skills even faster if you actually practice speaking. Yes, the more you listen, the more you’ll understand over time. However, using your vocabulary out loud with your own mouth can solidify those connections even more, especially since context is always important.

You could start with daily monologues just recapping your day with whatever vocab and grammar you have at your disposal, or do a weekly/biweekly “presentation” on a particular topic. You could talk about it with your tutor. HSK can easily be broken into topics (you can find all of the textbooks here for free: Free HSK Books | Complete Download (Levels 1-6 PDF) - Baúl Chino). That link also has all of the listening exercise recordings available for free.

Having a tutor is great, especially at your level where you know some Mandarin but you’re neither too novice nor too advanced. I personally don’t learn the mnemonics because I also started in college. Even when I was learning Japanese through Wanikani, the mnemonics were decent for getting started. Personal taste, I don’t feel like it help me for the long run.

[kaysik]

@akitak9821

I personally have found that you’ll grow your listening skills even faster if you actually practice speaking.

I found this too. Both because learning to say the sounds correctly taught me what I was meant to be listening for, and also because real conversation is great for building the emotional response around vocab words making them stick.

I will say though that there are two distinct sides of “my listening is bad” though:

1. I hear someone say words I should know, but I don’t recognise them in real-time
2. I hear people talk and I can pick-out all the sounds, but there are so many words I don’t know I can’t follow it

For issue #1 listening a lot to content at your level really is the answer (either in conversations or watching media). Personally I watched basically every single Lazy Chinese video ever made (and a bunch of other CI input on youtube). Zero issues understanding people talk these days if I know the vocab.

For issue #2, that’s where learning new vocab is required. How you learn those words is debatable, but at some point you do just need to cram mass vocab. If anyone finds a quick solve let me know because this is 95% of my problem currently - just too many damn words lol!

[akitak9821]

@kaysik

Personally I watched basically every single Lazy Chinese video ever made

SAME! 100% recommend Lazy Chinese. They cover so many topics and they explicitly label their videos as ‘beginner’, ‘lower intermediate’, ‘intermediate’, ‘upper/advanced intermediate’

@kaysik

you do just need to cram mass vocab

I feel that watching shows and videos above my level in tandem with cramming tons of new vocab from these sources via HanziHero has catapulted my Chinese listening significantly over the last 12-18 months.

[jantje]

a kind of hacky way to get vocab fast is to grab like 1 chapter of a book, or a 20min+ youtube video transcript, movie subtitle etc and put all the words into srs and re-read it constantly. also listen to the audio whether thats an audiobook/video. this is the easiest and fastest way to skyrocket your vocab at the cost of it being unbearably boring.