Pouiz study log

Study Logs
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Same same, just a little journal to share my progess and reflexions, it might be long and full of useless infos but i’ll be happy to have thoses details in a few years from now.

I visited China for the first time last July for work, one month in total, two weeks in Xi’an and two weeks in Shanghaï.
I initialy came with a really bad idea of China (thanks medias) but got hooked on mystery of it and the fact that we know so little of how advanced China is. I had an amazing time there, met nice people, insane food, discovered crazy tech, everything was surprising.

Not being able to speak to anyone who knew English and encountering a culture with very little American influence made me think that learning Chinese would be an incredible challenge and advantage as my work plans to take me to China a few times a year.
Previously i’ve learned Italian in roughly one year (French native) by sentence mining, anki, travel and tandem so I had confidence that work could pay.
While looking for learning solutions, I found HH on Reddit while i was initially interested in Mandarin blueprint but doubting because of the price.

I studied every day on HH until I flied to Hangzhou in September after completing HSK1 on HH and using a bit of HelloChinese.
By that time, I had logged about 50 hours of study in total.

That two weeks trip was amazing, Chinese people where even more welcoming when i used a little 牛逼 or 干杯.
Every now and then, I could slip in a few words and make myself understood, but it was impossible for me to understand the answers to my questions.
I dedicated almost all my study time to characters and words on HH, hoping to quickly start consuming media content with subtitles.

I followed by two weeks of vacations in Taiwan, where i knew people i work with in China. It felt like struggled even more with comprehension there and that i learned very little but i made nice encounters, had a super cute holiday crush with girl from there. It’s really an inspiring destination, really unique and sweet.

Back to my hometown in Paris, studied hard HH everyday for 1h in order to pass HSK4 before my Taiwanese 太太 comes visit me mid January.

I tried a few freetalk session with tutors but they felt painful, discussing with the few Chinese friends i made along the way tends to fall back ton English very quickly too.

Few weeks pass and here we are today :
I’m at 5 and a half month of studying and passed HSK3. 20% of HSK4, ~125h of studying (6-8h a week).
But the 20 items a day + the dictionnary has made that rythm very intense.
At that point i added 2 nice Anki deck with audio in order to train my ear a bit more, still aiming to consume media to increase input.
Also added Migaku in order to do sentence mining.

So that’s a lot lot of SRS and I came to realize along the way that i knew 方向盘 but was truely incapable to do a very basic conversation oraly.
I think i’m really hooked by the gamified visualisation of HSK level in HH, it really motivated me passing thoses levels, I felt like I was in a video game, leveling up, boosting my stats, always improving. I was proud of the discipline I put into it every morning.

But i feel i got lost along the way as it is an amazing tool, but that it really should not be the basis of my learning as i don’t use most of the vocab i learn here.
With a little tear in my eye, I’ve decided to stop learning 20 new items a day and slow down the pace a bit to focus more on consuming media—or something else, I’m not sure what yet. I’m open to any advice if you’ve ever been in the same situation as me. (tutoring ? More HelloChinese ? Hellotalk tandem ?)

The main goal is to be able to speak Chinese, toast with baijiu alongside uncles and aunts, make puns, enjoy the rock scene and one day live in mainland China for a few years.

3Q & 掰掰 !

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I’m in in a similar situation in that my brain loves the SRS game (getting questions right yay), and that we’re probably somewhat similar level (so take what I say with a grain of salt). I’ve also very recently cut down my new items a day (and I wrote a bit about why here).

But I am slightly different to you in that I’m pretty decent conversationally as long as we stick to topics I know the vocab for. I’ll happily have a full 30m iTalki tutoring session in Chinese (with say 2 or 3 English words when I need to ask for specific vocab (i.e. "怎么说’desert’？沙漠？谢谢” etc). Generally when I learn a word I try to learn it in a way I can use it rather than just learning it as an abstract item. I’d rather know 5 words I can use than 20 in abstract because my only goal is to be conversational.

There were 3 things I did that I think specifically helped me get comfortable talking:

  • My sentence Deck has 3 cards for every note specifically to force drilling output:
    • Reading (Hazi front → Audio + Eng back)
    • Listening (Audio front → Hanzi + Eng back)
    • Speaking (Eng front → Audio + Hanzi back)
    • All cards have audio, and when I get the speaking card I literally say it out loud, no just thinking it. Studying this deck takes way longer than simply Hanzi->Eng cards, but on the flip side it does wonders for getting comfortable with output. It’s basically SRS shadowing and I won’t mark a card right until I physically say all Tones correctly etc.
  • I intentionally practise talking with both iTalki tutors and randoms in a Chinese-English language exchange discord server. It SUCKS at the start, but find a tutor you like and keep at it, it absolutely gets better!
  • Since I cannot watch native content and follow it yet, I found lots of youtube learner material that matches my levels and try to watch a bunch of that each day

It’s very debatable how optimal my way is overall. Loads of people swear by mass cramming vocab to get to native media quicker, and that’s probably faster overall. But on the flip side I want to talk to people, so this way is more fun for me as I get to do the thing I want now, rather than waiting until I’m “good enough”.

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Thanks for all the tips !

May I ask :
How often do you have tutoring sessions ?
Do you go for free talk or classic HSK oriented lessons ?
At what level do you think it’s worth starting taking tutoring ?

Never really thought of having oral expression cards as i always doubted i’ll take the good habits alone, but your logic makes senses and i’ll take a look into it.
Also if you have a few decks to reccomend i’m all ears.

3 types of card seems like a lot and i wonder if the reading sentence card could be avoided ?
If you get theses phrases from chatting maybe you already spend time decoding them while you’re reading the convo i suppose. But nice worflow

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Firstly - I’m very far from fluent, so none of what I’m about to say is proven to work and get you to a high level. This is just what’s currently working for me. So happy to answer but your mileage may vary, I’m still very much intermediate!

I started with once a week but found twice a week works better for me so do that. Monday + Thursday, 30m each (and with two different tutors, so I only see each tutor once a week because I liked both of them lol). All my lessons are focused around conversation and I don’t do any HSK focused lessons or textbook work. I’m learning to talk to my in-laws, I don’t care about exams or certificates - I want to communicate more than pass exams. A lesson usually starts with “how was your week?” style small talk and half the time it naturally develops into a conversation about a random topic and takes the whole 30m. The other half the time once there is a natural pause the tutors usually pull out some material to discuss (i.e. describe what’s happening in this comic strip, or play spot the difference).

As for tutoring I think you need real time immediate feedback on your tones basically straight away - a paid tutor is the best way to get that. Learning to say the tones really helped me learn to hear them as well. There are some people that promote a “input only for first few thousand hours only then try to output” and I guess that might work for like French or German, but I couldn’t hear the tones when I started. No amount of raw input would have helped me figure out the tones without being taught how to say physically them! I couldn’t even imagine trying to read Chinese without being able to properly pronounce things in my head.

You’re already reading Chinese alone right? So your saying the characters pronunciation in your head? Hell even just HH reviews you’re saying the character internally when it shows up? So if you’re pretending to say it already, there is a chance you’re already forming bad habits by imagining them wrong? If you can’t physically say them personally I doubt you can imagine saying them correctly. At least that was my theory and why I went straight to getting corrected.

As for the sentences I don’t WRITE the sentence, they’re all from valid sources so I know they’re correct (often if I say something wrong in my tutoring session or on https://langcorrect.com I’ll put the corrected sentence into my deck). So I know the sentence structure/grammar/word choice is 100% correct. The only thing I can possibly get wrong is my pronunciation - and for that I’m getting feedback twice a week. The chance of me fossilising a pronunciation mistake is basically non-existent. Without the tutoring it’s very much a possibility. But with tutoring? Nah not going to happen.

I will say I don’t put EVERYTHING into that deck. That deck with the 3 directions is specifically “I want to know to say this” deck. There are a lot of words I don’t add that just passively flow past and I’ll recognise them in passing but cannot say them myself. So it’s never become overwhelming for me because the content is curated to things I specifically want. If it was just every word/sentence I ever saw it’d be a nightmare lol.

Reading cards - I actually agree so technically I have two note types, exactly the same except one has the 3x card and one note only has the speaking+listening card. about 25% are made as the full 3 direction notes, the other 75% or just the listening/speaking notes.

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Listening and speaking is far harder than reading and writing, in my experience. Part of this comes from the fact that reading and writing are divorced from time, so to speak. If reading a sentence you can sit there and think about it, or re-read it multiple times. Likewise when writing a text message or whatever else, even easily looking up a word in a dictionary or whatever else.

However, this is not the case for something like listening. While you can ask someone to repeat themselves once, maybe twice, they probably won’t slow down when doing so. (And if they do, it likely won’t be as much help). Because learners of Chinese as adults are usually overly text-based in their learning approach, it is also somewhat likely that they are saying things you actually know, just are having trouble recognizing phonetically!

The best advice I have is to treat listening as its own skill and to carve out time for it, especially now that you are doing less daily HanziHero lessons. For speaking, I myself would not bother too much with it until you are able to fully understand basic conversation. After all, even if you spoke Chinese perfectly, it would not be much use in a conversation if you could not understand what the other party was saying! Additionally, listening alone can help you get a better feeling for tones and the phonetics of Chinese.

The method I used to train listening from a very basic level was to use textbook dialogues or other learner resources. These have three main benefits: the audio is abnormally clear, they come with a “new vocabulary list” that outline any words in the dialogue or excerpt that may be new to you, and they are fairly short and limited in scope. This was my procedure:

  1. Listen without any subtitles/transcript. Even if you fail to understand the meaning of what they say, try to focus on the sounds they are making. Listen multiple times, trying to see if you can recognize any words or grammatical structures.
  2. Listen once more, this time with the list of vocabulary words. Try to match the pinyin from the words that are likely in the audio with what you hear. This helps you train the skill of recognizing words from phonetics alone, instead of written characters. Do this multiple times.
  3. Finally, read along with the transcript while listening to the audio. Make sure you understand everything.
  4. Listen once more with nothing but the audio. Do you still understand everything? I like to even listen to the excerpt multiple times across the next day or two to make sure it is seared into my mind.

The next step above this is watching children’s cartoons. Again with a focus on repetition. Repetition I think is the key, as it makes things more enjoyable. After all, if HanziHero showed everyone new words and characters each day but there were no reviews afterwards, it would be somewhat useful but far less enjoyable! (and less useful, of course). The repetition is what allows us to make sure we truly understand something.

Hope that helps!

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Hey Hanzi Hero,

I’ve recently changed my learning method approach, my motivation for learning Chinese is still strong, but the more I progress, the more I feel there is such a long way to go and I don’t want to be stuck speaking at lower level for years, so I’m trying to increase the amount of work i’m putting.
I’d be happy to have feedbacks over my studying strategy.

  • Hanzi Hero : 20min/day
    Following the thought of me realizing i’ve relied too much on HH lately i’ve changed my method :

    • I have skipped all the components and some words i don’t think i’ll use soon.
    • I downgraded my lessons to +5 carsd a day, i try to only learn prioritized items wich i’ve encoutered.
    • I’m noticing there’s a lot of characters I’ve skipped in the early days because I was using Pleco’ flashcard on the side but I keep remembering how to write them in HH. I wonder if i could skip more characters in order to lightens my revisions again and maybe increase new words.
    • Having the possibility to make sentence cards would be great (these allowing to “skip” vocab/character cards)
      I sometimes would like to transform my word cards into sentence cards, especially for words i never encountered or used. I could skip them and create cards in Anki but i like HH interface.
    • I am also considering switching to traditional characters because there might be a case scenario where I’m moving to Taiwan later this year. Does anyone has ever done the switch here ?

  • Anki : 20min/day

    • I’m using the Chinese Wiki grammar deck of cards that someone recommended me here + hyper TTS audio, really cool and progressive. I can do thoses without looking and pretty much everywhere.
    • Also my personnal decks from vocab learned through tutoring to have speaking cards.

  • Migaku :10min/day reviewing + 10 min/day watching

    • Simply reviewing flashcards I’ve made through the Migaku app / Netflix extension.
      This app is really flawless when it comes to watching graded material on my phone and making flashcards in one click. Allows me to really listen to graded stories that are increasingly interesting without being painfully hard.

  • Tutoring : aiming for 2h a week

    • I recently started meeting tutors on Italki, only did 30min long lessons as they are quite painful, i keep searching for my words and messing with sentence structure. But i’ll keep it going, my teachers have been very patient and i aways felt like i had a genuine conversation at the end of the lesson.
      I guess the more you progress the longer you can study with a teacher ?
      Can’t go above 1h30/week divided into 3*30min at the moment because i feel like i need time to diggest what i’ve learned before going back in class.

    • I’m proceeding this way : free discussions over some basics questions where I am learning how to talk about me.
      Then my teacher writes in the chat all the vocabulary I don’t know and also full sentences I need to practice.
      I then paste the vocab in HH and the sentence in Anki to create 2 ways cars : listening and speaking.

    • While I was learning Italian and hanging in many immersion learning subs i remebered that speaking cards (going from english on the front to target language + audio on the back.) were quite considered as unproductive but it seems like my brain simply can’t output Chinese even tho my comprehension is progressing.
      As the speaking cards really take longer to review than other cards I followed kaysik advice and i’m only creating cards for things i want to say.

  • SuperChinese app : trying to reach 20min/day

    • This is the one I’m failing the most. I really feel like I need a structured course and I found an app more gamified than following an HSK textbook (haven’t really tried it tho). I’ve heard tons of good reviews about this app, but there’s something that really doesn’t appeal to me. I don’t find it funny or interesting, it’s already better than HelloChinese in my opinion.
      Should i persist or try something else ?
      Maybe i could switch that for the method described by Kevin in his last commend, does someone have platform/app to reccomend in order to do that.

  • Hellotalk : 0min a day

    • Conversations came and go, it’s hard to keep track with Chinese people due to the time difference, i also tried to bring my conversation with chinese speaking friends there because of the functionnalities but we keep going back to IG/wechat at some point.

Recently I really spent most of my free time during the week learning Chinese or trying to figure out how to get where i want to be.
But so far, I’m really happy of the progress I’ve made recently, especially in terms of comprehension, still a lot of work to do but that nerdy adventure is really cool so far !

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When you use the course switch it’ll carry over any characters that are the same in both courses.

If there’s a potential future where you’re going to Taiwan, I’d agree you’d be best served switching over to traditional. You’ll also learn the Taiwanese pronunciation for some of the words so you aren’t caught off guard :slight_smile:

What are you trying to achieve with SuperChinese? Just a general app, or speaking, listening etc.

If it’s about speaking you may be better served just repeating out loud any of the flashcards generated from Migaku while going through them; or if for listening, having a pure audio card where it’s only audio on the front and characters on the back can help too. I’m not sure if migaku is still interfaced with Anki or not to make it so you can create another card type.

I’d agree that speaking/listening is hard because it takes effort and time to repeat out loud or to listen, making reviews feel a lot slower than just reading :sweat_smile:

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Regarding the character switch i just wondered if anyone had done it already in order to understand how much times it take and how hard it is :slight_smile:

Blockquote
What are you trying to achieve with SuperChinese? Just a general app, or speaking, listening etc.

I’m just trying to have some form of “organized curiculum” as i’m seeing that a lot of people still study with textbooks. But i could definitely just focus on tutoring, listening and gathering vocab. I don’t know i just felt that i was risking something going out of the classic road.

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Yeah, one of the more frustrating parts of language learning is figuring out what would be the best use of your time, as it always changes depending on your skill level.

And I guess it’s always a balance, because if you stick too closely to the academic methods it’s likely you’ll get sick of it. And if you go too far out into uncharted/theoretical territory it becomes too unstructured and uncertain that there is a pay-off to be had :sweat_smile:

This sounds like a fruitful path seeing as your main objective is speaking/listening :slight_smile: It’s smart that you make the graded readers into audio cards with Migaku, too. Maybe you can continue with it for another month and if it feels too slow then you could add on additional resources.