I think it is popular, when learning languages, to also do sentence cards to make the transition to native material easier. As a stepping stone. We’ve had previous requests on integrating the sentences within HanziHero somehow:
But having full sentence cards in tandem with the current HanziHero review load (which is already a lot) would be too much(!), I think. Also, it remains an unsolved problem on how to even introduce these separate sentence cards within the HanziHero flow, especially for those far along in their respective course
A popular alternative in other language communities would be Targeted sentence cards:
Targeted sentence cards are the in-between of word cards and sentence cards:
Word cards show and grade only the word
Pros: quick & straightforward answering
Cons: lack of context, difficult to feel how it is used in the language.
Sentence cards show and grade understanding whole sentences
Pros: context & familiarity with how the language is used
Cons: slower review times and complex answering (e.g. having to “translate” a whole sentence as an answer).
Targeted sentence cards show you a sentence, but highlights a word and you are only graded on the word!
With this method, you get the pros of both sentence cards and word cards while also forgoing their cons. This method also elegantly solves adding sentences to the workload – just transform the current word cards into targeted sentence cards!
We’ve added this as an Experimental setting.
You can try this out by going to your Application Settings and toggling the “Turn word reviews into Targeted Sentences reviews” option at the bottom:
They work the exact same as the previous word cards, just that now you see the word within an example sentence. And when the audio plays you’ll also hear the sentence audio.
I experimented with this for a few days and I thought it was helpful enough to introduce – let me know what you think
Welp, had a whole SRS deck dedicated to sentences, a lot of which were copied straight from HanziHero. Now I can axe it completely due to this. Just like the dictionary, yet another great new functionality from HH. I particularly love how it seems to randomize the example sentences rather than just choosing one.
Small suggestions would be to
Add two separate hotkeys for word pronunciation (keep it as P) and sentence pronunciation (new hotkey). It’s a bit jarring to hear the sentence pronunciation before being able to internalize the word pronunciation.
Show pinyin above every hanzi after submitting the card
Show the English translation of the sentence under the Chinese sentence after submitting the card
This update is super nice. I tend to remember words better when I have context to go with them and so this helps out a lot.
I do agree that it would be nice to see the meaning of the sentence, but only after you’ve answered the meaning card. Since you can randomize the order of those, maybe do something like:
Reading answered → show pinyin for the sentence
Meaning answered → show English meaning for the sentence
Good point! I’m curious if anyone likes the current autoplay to where we could make a separate setting I was always used to autoplay when dealing with Anki, but I can also see the alternative of keeping it off would encourage one to not get stuck listening to sentence audio
Yeah, I think these would be nice improvements to where one wouldn’t have to scroll the info tab/click around for the pinyin
Good idea on restricting the information depending on card type. Another challenge may be making sure there’s enough space It may fit if the fonts are small enough, maybe, but there’s also the issue of mobile
I completely agree! Having both sentence and word audio makes a big difference, and improving TTS quality would be a great addition. A wider variety of sentence structures would definitely help reinforce grammar patterns too. Like you, I also prefer to check the full sentence meaning before accepting an answer as correct, so showing the translation afterward is really useful. Hopefully, this can be implemented in some way.
Some words only have a phrase like 合格老師， this lacks context and a whole sentence would be a lot more helpful.
This significantly slows down the reviews but it feels like it will do wonders for my general reading abilities and probably even grammar with the increased exposure to full sentences. So i really like it so far!
We got about ~250 HSK characters left to cover (by adding at least one related word). After that I plan to go through and do a quality pass on the examples. All of the past ~2k+ words I’ve added have full sentences for each example, the examples that consist of just a brief phrase are from the words I added long ago. They will be cleaned up and replaced with sentences when I do the quality pass.
Pros: quick & straightforward answering
Cons: lack of context, difficult to feel how it is used in the language.
I was always used to autoplay when dealing with Anki, but I can also see the alternative of keeping it off would encourage one to not get stuck listening to sentence audio
