I overestimated the effect of spaced repetition. For six months, I used Anki every day to recap Chinese characters. At the end of the term I was perfectly prepared for the test. Afterwards, I didn't study my flash cards again. Only a few weeks later I found out that I've forgotten most characters or at least some of their details. I expected that after six months of daily practice (about 20 minutes per day) I would have stored at least some characters in my long term memory.
I began my study of Chinese in 1975. I got to be good enough in reading Chinese to set the ceiling of scores obtained in an experimental administration of a test for Chinese language for speakers of English. (The test was not further developed by the test developers, but I saw the summary of norming administration scores.) I worked for quite a few years as a Chinese-English interpreter for government-sponsored people-to-people visits to the United States. I was just reading Chinese-language newspapers via Google News just before bopping over here to Hacker News.
Simply put, the biggest single mistake learners of Chinese make in learning Chinese characters is learning them only in isolation and not also by reading connected Chinese-language text in which Chinese characters appear in "compounds" (meaningful Chinese words). The full argument for doing this is developed by the late John DeFrancis (a brilliant language teacher and textbook author) in the front matter of his book Beginning Chinese Reader,[1] which is still a very worthwhile book decades after it was first published. DeFrancis built in a lot of spaced repetition in the book lessons, back in the days before "spaced repetition" was a trendy term, but he crucially also makes sure the lesson texts illustrate the various ways that Chinese characters enter into compounds to form high-frequency words in the modern Chinese vocabulary. Try it if you'd like to more Chinese in the most efficient way possible.
P.S. for a more extensive discussion of how to learn natural human languages effectively, see a comment of mine from about two years ago that was very popular with other readers of HN:
I'm really glad to see such an encouraging and useful comment on HN.
I'm right in the middle of the John DeFrancis series (just started Intermediate Chinese Reader volume 2). These books seem to be almost forgotten and I haven't found any modern equivalent, so I was starting to feel slightly lonely in my quest for Chinese reading fluency :) I started them after trying
* regular flashcards: not very effective for me, as all the accumulated knowledge would disappear very quickly after I stopped practicing
* "modern" graded readers: they're nice, but far less structured than the DeFrancis' series, and they often stop at a beginner/intermediate level.
What's truly unique about the DeFrancis' series compared to other graded readers is that the texts are adapted to the vocabulary lists, rather than the other way around. Therefore characters and compounds can be introduced logically, in a coherent manner: for example each new character comes with a cluster of words that use this character, making the whole much easier to remember. The downside is that the texts often feel contrived and boring, but if you're serious about learning to read it feels much more effective and gratifying on the long term. The approach used by most other readers is to start from a simple and enjoyable story, and then adding a glossary containing the more advanced words in the story. But although the story itself is more natural and enjoyable for the reader, the vocabulary itself is much harder to remember.
It would be awesome if someone was willing to put in all the hard work it took to craft the DeFrancis' series, and write something similar with a more modern and less academia-focused content.
I used Pimsleur to learn Japanese. They use a kind of SRS where words don't get quizzed directly, but embedded in small phrases. Using words in context made me more sure of myself and I was immediately able to use them in conversations or understand them in videos. With each phrase more than one concept could be refreshed. I think it is essential to put small phrases in order to develop the vocabulary.
Also, for absolute beginners this method has the advantage of forming a solid understanding of the core of the language (those 1000 words that see over 50% usage in regular conversation) and also learn accent really well - cards being in audio format. It feels as if I were a small child learning his native language.
Anki is great to help learning languages, however I think you have to make some special effort to actually use the words (in full sentences) when you learn them if you want to be able to reuse them in the future. One-to-one flash cards only helps for basic information retention. For example I find kanas much easier to learn than kanjis, as the former translate perfectly as plain syllables in western languages, while the latter can be far more subtle.
Also after six months, if you're successful in your reviews, Anki should not expect you to review your (old) cards before several weeks, so it's strange that you forgot most of them for your test if it occurred in that range. It can also depends on the type of test I guess, how was it?
> Also after six months, if you're successful in your reviews, Anki should not expect you to review your (old) cards before several weeks, so it's strange that you forgot most of them for your test if it occurred in that range.
The test went well. It was some weeks after the test that I began forgetting.
> however I think you have to make some special effort to actually use the words (in full sentences) when you learn them if you want to be able to reuse them in the future.
yeah, I absolutely agree. I think context is key. Nothing beats being forced to use a language.
"Anki is great to help learning languages, however I think you have to make some special effort to actually use the words (in full sentences) when you learn them if you want to be able to reuse them in the future. One-to-one flash cards only helps for basic information retention."
Try a different Anki deck, maybe. I've been studying Polish, and a good portion of my cards are phrases or full sentences.
Yeah, the "downside" of spaced repetition is that you can't stop and expect it to stick (unless you have other means of keeping your memory fresh, such as actually using a language you've been learning). I have some subjects in my stack of cards (10,014 and counting!) that I'm not really so interested in anymore, but I keep them around because I'm paranoid that in a few years I'll want to pick them up again and will have to start from scratch.
It's not really so much a downside as an unrealistic expectation, like expecting to keep weight off after you've stopped dieting.
What method did you use to initially learn the characters? If you just used Anki, I could see your result as making sense.
I used Heisig's Remembering the Hanzi to learn the characters and then would practice them in a space repetition system. A few years later I can still write most of them. His method has you create a story and make mental image associations for each character. Eventually you forget the stories over time, but the character usually sticks.
> What method did you use to initially learn the characters?
We were introduced to the characters in class and subsequently learned how to write them. So after being introduced to a character I repeated it on paper for a couple of lines. I repeated this exercise from time to time. I also read the stories of the text book out loud and listened to the recording of the texts. But as I've pointed out in my other post, you have to have context to really learn a language. Just the fact that I used several types of learning doesn't mean that they weren't kind of shallow.
The technique you've delineated above certainly sounds like a better approach.
I find that in my language learning, when I have a question about a vocabulary word or a grammar point, I have to go back in my memory to the social situation in which I first heard it. Whether on TV or in conversation. I personally don't get the same hit to my memory from flash cards, though it may just be me.
> I expected that after six months of daily practice (about 20 minutes per day) I would have stored at least some characters in my long term memory.
Yeah, it doesn't work that way with SRS. If you're not actively using what you learned with your SRS (like say using Chinese on a daily basis) of course you're going to forget it! It's the same with bodybuilding: You have to constantly train your muscles and eat enough calories or they will shrink back to what they were before. It's not like you can gym, get as big as you want and then think if you stop you'll retain whatever you built :)
