So I’ll cut to the chase
– Anki is a flashcard app, it uses spaced repetition and calculates when you should review the cards again for you.
– I just finished a deck called “Spoonfed Chinese”
– It was based off some Japanese website with a Chinese sentence bank. They put it back up actually and they have photos now if you want to edit some cards with that in mind.
– Reviewed every day for 1 and half hours on my subway commute and whenever I had breaks or periods I had to wait for someone. Total study time = 5 years. With 1 or 2 month hiatuses every year.
– Had some Chinese friends review the deck and they said that some words were strange, dated, or not how Chinese people would actually say it.
– The deck does not capture the full extent of the Chinese or English meanings.
– The pinyin transcriptions start getting off when you reach intermediate level sentences. Common mis-transcribed words will be 得 (it should be dei for sentences with “have to”, especially if a verb follows the dei), 地 (de, for adverbs, not di for Earth)
– The English sentences are modelled after the Chinese, but at high levels, they start getting super awkward, so I just changed the English sentences to half-Chinese half-English sentences, where I have to replace the English sentences in the Chinese. Sometimes, I just delete the English sentence and put a photo or gif to make the deck less boring.
– I used Google Ngrams to search frequency of word usage for synonyms. If the word was the least common synonym used, for example “巡弋” vs “巡逻”, I’d just change the card to the common one and remind myself to guess the more “literary” aka “less commonly used” one as a bonus.
———————–
# What’s next#
## Where to Sentence Mine? ##
Now I’m sentence mining anywhere I can find audio with a transcript using the “Chrome Audio Capture” extension. For example, the Du Chinese app has a lot of free samples of varying difficulties with audio that you can employ this technique. If I can’t find it, who cares, point is, I’m reading more now. If a sentence really stumps me, I’ll add it to Anki by first putting the new vocabulary by itself, then putting the vocabulary in the context of that sentence (as the grammar is sometimes complex too).
Those who finished Spoonfed, what else are using to sentence mine now?
## Writing Hanzi ##
I’ve been neglecting actually writing Hanzi with a pen and paper/iPad. I know how to write 50 characters but recognize about 2000 hahaha. I found an awesome deck for HSK words ([https://ankiweb.net/shared/info/1380849403](https://ankiweb.net/shared/info/1380849403)). Note that it’s not designed for PC or Mac users. just ios and android.
