Best learning strategy for new words

[YYY]

I was in Beijing for two weeks, meeting up with my Chinese girlfriend for the first time. In preparation, I had been trying to learn Chinese on my own for a few months, but rather foolishly did not make the spoken language or vocabulary acquisition my main focus (only about 3 weeks in advance I started with the first of the Pimsleur Mandarin Chinese series, which proved to be the most useful). Hence, in practice my spoken Chinese was just plain horrible. If it was not for Pleco - and my girlfriend's own Chinese-English dictionary in her Nokia handset - she and I would have had a very hard time to communicate.
I ended up with about 400 words that I looked up in Pleco during those two weeks. On the plane back to Dublin I added all of those words as flashcards (in hindsight, it would have been much easier if I had done that immediately, but I did not know about the flashcard functionality). Much to my glee, there was audio pronunciation for all of the words and the ability to tap on the individual characters. However, after SRS testing the first 100 words I only had a success rate of 33%. Now that it has been testing the next 237 words it seems that my score will be a lot less than that. I hardly seem to be able to remember anything at all. Even words that I saw the day before are rarely ever remembered. I find myself trying to analyze the individual characters for clues, but this has worked only for very few words. Most of the characters simply do not make any sense at all. This made me think that perhaps I should get back to learning the individual characters first, using something like Skritter, Heisig's method and/or the etymology of the characters (e.g. zhongwen.com) - or perhaps just my word list for starters. I would expect that writing the words would help me remember them. Another thought was that if an example sentence could be added to a flashcard, the word could be learned in context and might be better remembered.

I will be going back to Beijing on April 6 and it would be great if I could learn these 400 words by then.

What do you find is the best learning strategy for new words? What has worked best for you?

 

[argothian]

Good question, I was looking for a good strategy for some time, but didn't have much success.
The best way to learn new characters and words for me: I make myself comfortable, have some tea, music... and write and write and write characters, takes me hours. I usualy use pencil or fountain pen. To remember new characters, first I search for ethymology, brake the characters to components using wenlin or zhongwen and try to find some connection between the compounds of character, then I write characters from memory and repeat until remembered. Then I forget them and have to start from beginning.
The characters are from school texts so I already have the context. We have to translate the text and then learn the caracters.

Don't rely on SRS, because it is supposed to help you review what you have already learned and not to learn new characters!

Just recently I found blog Hacking chinese, you can find some good tips for learning chinese.
check this:
http://www.hackingchinese.com/?p=175
http://www.hackingchinese.com/?p=177

Think about what you want to focus on. If it is speaking, learning characters will only slow you down. Just use book with pinyin and recording. In the beginning, tones and pronunciation are realy important, so learn it properly and leave characters for later.
http://www.hackingchinese.com/?p=950

 

[pprendeville]

I was in Beijing for two weeks, meeting up with my Chinese girlfriend for the first time. In preparation, I had been trying to learn Chinese on my own for a few months, but rather foolishly did not make the spoken language or vocabulary acquisition my main focus (only about 3 weeks in advance I started with the first of the Pimsleur Mandarin Chinese series, which proved to be the most useful). Hence, in practice my spoken Chinese was just plain horrible. If it was not for Pleco - and my girlfriend's own Chinese-English dictionary in her Nokia handset - she and I would have had a very hard time to communicate.
I ended up with about 400 words that I looked up in Pleco during those two weeks. On the plane back to Dublin I added all of those words as flashcards (in hindsight, it would have been much easier if I had done that immediately, but I did not know about the flashcard functionality). Much to my glee, there was audio pronunciation for all of the words and the ability to tap on the individual characters. However, after SRS testing the first 100 words I only had a success rate of 33%. Now that it has been testing the next 237 words it seems that my score will be a lot less than that. I hardly seem to be able to remember anything at all. Even words that I saw the day before are rarely ever remembered. I find myself trying to analyze the individual characters for clues, but this has worked only for very few words. Most of the characters simply do not make any sense at all. This made me think that perhaps I should get back to learning the individual characters first, using something like Skritter, Heisig's method and/or the etymology of the characters (e.g. zhongwen.com) - or perhaps just my word list for starters. I would expect that writing the words would help me remember them. Another thought was that if an example sentence could be added to a flashcard, the word could be learned in context and might be better remembered.

I will be going back to Beijing on April 6 and it would be great if I could learn these 400 words by then.

What do you find is the best learning strategy for new words? What has worked best for you?

I'm fascinated by this post. I'm studying in Chinese and International Business in DIT Aungier St Dublin. Would love to know how you met your girlfriend. I'm privileged enough to be married to a Chinese girl so if you need any advice on that side of things I'd be happy to meet you.

On the learning characters side of things, I advise you to learn the basics first. Stroke order is essential and for me this was done by repetition. There are rules for how to write a character (top to bottom, horizontal strokes before vertical, inside to outside etc) and once you are familiar with these it becomes much easier to learn characters. Go and learn the radicals next which are the building blocks of characters. I believe there are 214 Kangxi radicals but our textbook (Integrated Chinese which I recommend) only covers approx 40 initially (I guess the most common ones). Another very good book I got recently is Tuttles Learning the First 800 Characters which I find fantastic. The flashcard function on Pleco I find useful mainly after I've learned to write the character. Its good to use as a refresher tool. Looking forward to when they will add pictures. I find reading children's books very useful to reinforce vocab as they are relatively easy (I read them to our kids). Another good website I came across is Clavissinica.com and the stepping stones guide. Check it out. I like the simple poems for learning numbers.

As I said, would love to meet up and have a chat with you so feel free to PM me.

 

[LongShiKong]

Bet there are others here who also teach English (in China) who know repeated and varied input and output practice is the key to retention. While Pleco's flashcard self-test is superb in and of itself, that's exactly what it is, not a learning tool. Argothian is write (I mean right), you've got to experience the characters through writing, typing, texting or printing and doing something with them. Another poster had mentioned looking at radical elements and construing some mental mnemonic. Li Leyi's Tracing the Roots of Chinese Characters: 500 Cases (2 volumes) illustrations/explanations accompanying the evolution from jiaguwen to simplified can certainly help you there. There's also Chineseetymology.org which provides a free iPhone/Android app/

By varied input, I mean you shouldn't just be looking at random lists of words. Of the characters that stumped you during a flashcard session, were they presented to you in isolation or within a 2 character word? How many would recognize if presented with their common partner or within a text? I'm guessing for me it'd be between 40-70%. For example, in a flashcard session, I might confuse these (午/牛，总/忠）but rarely within a text.

I had the good sense when I started learning Chinese to choose a book that didn't place pinyin transcriptions underneath the text so I was forced to commit as much as possible of the glossary characters and pronunciation to short-term memory prior to confronting them within the context of the text. A good coursebook author as any experienced teacher knows will carefully and systematically select, introduce and recycle language appropriate to the needs of a generalized reader. Recycling language in later units tests/reinforces the retention rate of the students.

I've recently used Google Translate to translate lists of words/phrases/sentences/dialogues from English into Chinese. I find it an effective (Pimsleur) way of engaging memory while drilling. Although it's not perfect,it's faster to proofread and correct machine translation than it is to translate manually from scratch. Try it yourself: type up a list and in seconds, you'll have a (near correct) Chinese list. Paste both lists side by side into Excel, print and fold and you can test yourself. When finished, unfold the paper to check. You could even run the Chinese list through a Pinyin-izer to add a third column prior to printing.