How do you review your flashcards ?

dustpuppy

榜眼
What methods do you use to motivate yourself to review flashcards ? I have used one method before where I will play an online game such as call of duty. When I die in the game, I will wait before hitting respawn, and review 15 flashcards. And repeat this everytime I die. So after an hour or two, I will either have played like a god, or reviewed a bunch of flashcards.
 

jlnr

进士
Mostly: Not installing any social networking crap on my phone: No Twitter, no Facebook. It's easy to get sucked into checking them all the time but it's never really worth it. Now that Pleco has the lowest 'friction' on my phone, I tend to do repetitions every time I am stuck in the subway, waiting for takeout, …

Also: I use a "don't break the chain" app, see this website for the idea: http://lifehacker.com/281626/jerry-seinfelds-productivity-secret
Doing at least 50 repetitions every day keeps the new cards flowing in, but that's really just the daily minimum.
 
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abdrifter

Guest
I get up at 5 am on a weekday, do my flashcards 5:15 - 7 am. Pleco flashcards take about one hour, with about 20 new cards every day and another 200 to review. The rest of the time I do sentence flashcards in Anki, where I put any sample sentence from Pleco and ABC dictionaries that I might find useful. Whatever is left undone in the morning (roughly, half an hour worth) I'm able to do at lunch and/or after work. If I ever decided to skip a day or two (and I haven't in years), Anki reviews would piles up and backlogs make me nervous. Naturally, on weekends I don't have to wake up that early, and do my card flipping more randomly during the day. 汉语学不完的!
 

antony73

Member
I use vocabulary form chinesepod.com. So whatever words I am learning are words from a dialogue that I have been studying.

As for other words, I work through the 5,000 word list. Write out each new character several times, (physical: pen and paper), and then add it to my flashcards, (digital: pleco).
 

dustpuppy

榜眼
The tip about the "don't break the chain app" has given my learning an insane boost. I'm at 10 days now and i'm going to keep going as long as I can. I don't think i've studied 10 days in a row ever before. But reviewing every single day really helps.
 

dustpuppy

榜眼
Speaking of gamification, here's my Anki setup:
tFcPG8t.jpg

I use Keysticks to map controller buttons to anki keyboard shortcuts. It makes it just a bit more fun.
 
Totally agree with abdrifter How do you review your flashcards ?

I think the key element is not really the learning technique, but the regularity and time spent every day.

I study everyday between 1 and 2 hours depending on possibilities, before work and during lunch time essentially. Every day using Pleco SLS to revise between 100 to 200 old characters, and adding some new characters (generally between 30 to 80 a time) every 2 or 3 days. I add new characters whenever the previous new characters are learnt and remembered to approx 85-90% correct.

Then about 2 to 3 times a week I try to read texts: found good material here:
http://chinese.rutgers.edu/content_c.htm

Learning characters is one thing, but ultimately the goal is to read and type.
Ah, and chatting in Chinese more than English is also a good habit!

My 50 cents :).
 
What I do is I have several ziploc bags with the flashcards inside. One marked daily, another bi-weekly, weekly, monthly, quarterly, etc.
All the flashcards start in the daily bag. I review those cards every day. When I get it right, I move the cards to the next bag. I review the weekly ones every week. If I ever get any wrong, I move them back to the daily bag. My goal is to get them all to the last bag.
 
BoardProphet, how many cards does that represent in total?
That sounds like you are doing manually what the SRS system in Pleco is doing automatically: the better you know the cards the less frequently they come back, and if you forget the card it starts again from 0.
If you haven't seen it, try the SRS system. When you are working on many thousands of cards, it gets out of control if you do it manually :).
 
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