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Tips and tricks to help you learn Chinese

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Should I do more than my daily Chinese character learning reviews? If yes, then what?

Recently, a Chinese learner phrased something in a particular way. He reached out to us and said: “I have a memory problem. How can I do more reviews?”

I believe a lot of people feel the same way. They think learning Chinese is challenging work since it requires too many memory skills.

They are under the impression they should work a lot every day since they don’t memorize things quickly. And Chinese is a complex language to learn; at least, that’s what everybody thinks. So they worry they’re not remembering enough to make their learning journey successful. Here, the learner feels they need to do more once they’ve done their reviews to drive what he learned in Chinese into his long-term memory even more. Is that true? If so, what should he do more? What should you do more? Let’s take a look.

It’s hard to learn consistently. It can be complicated to feel confident about your learning journey, to be sure of what you do know vs. what you think you know, but it’s still sitting in your short-term memory.
That’s why you often do extra work. You want to do more because you’re not sure if you know well enough the Chinese characters you’ve learned. So you figure it’s better to do more, just in case your actions aren’t enough.

But you know what? Here’s a difference between working hard and a lot and working efficiently. There is such a thing as overwork, and it’s helpful not to go there. So let’s see why and what you can do to reassure yourself that you do know what you’re learning well enough.

Learning you can trust

The Ninchanese app is made to make you discover new notions and review them when you need to. That way, you don’t need to think about managing your memory: Ninchanese’s system (SRS) keeps track of that for you. For example, imagine knowing a lot of Chinese characters. It’s a challenge to keep all of them fresh and not forget them entirely. It’s particularly tough for someone not in the country to use the vocabulary they learn daily. Luckily, that’s something the SRS in Ninchanese solves for you.

Here’s an example of near-perfect learning you can get thanks to Ninchanese SRS:

An effective and personalized learning

The SRS makes you meet and run into Chinese characters again and again, always at the right moment – for you. Memorization is what’s best about Ninchanese’s SRS. It evolves as you use it to match your learning style better, and it becomes the best friend you know you can rely on to not forget Chinese characters. Ninchanese’s learning system was designed explicitly for learning Chinese, and if we dare say so ourselves, it works better than other SRS.

Learning with reviews. Why do they matter?

The real question? Do you have a memory problem? Use the SRS and let it know more about you and your memory working mechanics. Let it get to know you for a while, and understand your memorization path and learning curve. Once done, there’s no need to do extra work, such as repeating Chinese characters repeatedly.

So to answer the question: Can I do more Reviews?

No, you can’t do more reviews on Ninchanese than what you need to do. It can be hard to trust the system but take your time and do your reviews every day. You’ll see the good it does for your memorization of Chinese characters. Our learners have a memorization rate of over 97% of the Chinese character they learn when they do their review every day. Reviewing makes it easier to manage the memory process of learning Chinese characters efficiently.

Since learning requires a lot of things to work on, once you’ve finished your reviews, there are still things you can do. For instance, if you have new, freshly unlocked words, here’s an area you can focus on: your recall time. The recall time is something to train. You won’t remember a word better if you see it more. But by playing a time attack, you will recognize Chinese characters faster.

#1 – Sneak in some reviews with time attacks: to work on your Recall Time

The time attacks are a game you play in Ninchanese. The goal is to answer the pinyin of Chinese characters or their meaning as fast as possible. Both will help you learn to recognize and bring to mind characters faster. Each time you finish a time attack, you win a medal if you can recall them quickly. It’s nice to do that from time to time in earlier unlocked stages, to see if you need a refresher or to check how well and quickly these words reappear in your brain. And with new freshly unlocked stages, time attacks are a challenge but lots of fun too. Try to get a gold medal.

Benefits of the time attack

Time attacks work on your recall time. See, when you start to learn something, it’s in your brain, somewhere. Trouble is: where? Recalling that notion can take a looong time if you don’t work on it. So that’s why the time attacks focus on your recall time. It eases your mind and helps it remember faster.

Doing the time attacks especially help you with two things: reading and understanding. When you read Chinese,t there are two stages: the one where you stop at every character you try to read, and the phase where you can tackle a full sentence head-on, and understand its meaning without pausing to think about reading each Chinese character. Time attacks help you reach the second phase, and that’s not an easy trick to pull off. With time attacks, you’ll understand faster Chinese characters and make the meaning association more easily. Then when you encounter these Chinese characters, you’ll appreciate the meaning of text faster and ease the reading.

Doing the time attack helps in a lot of ways, as you can see.

To do them, go back to a vocabulary stage and look for the time attack.

#2 – Reinforce your reviews – Practice making sentences with meaningful grammar points

How can you remember better the Chinese characters you’ve learned so far? The best method is to use the characters you’ve learned in context and to understand how to use them. Because understanding is the best way to memorize, doing the grammar and dialogue stages on Ninchanese are a great idea because theyteach youw how to use these words.

Benefits of the grammar stages

Working on making a sentence with the words you’ve learned is crucial. I firmly believe that you remember better when you understand. And when you are using a Chinese character in a sentence, you are giving it the chance to show you how to use them. And profoundly understand it. You’ll often say “ah, that’s how you use it”. We’ve worked all our grammar sentences with this idea in the back of our heads. Our goal is first to bring clear grammar lessons you’ll have no trouble understanding, but the secondary goal is to use the words you’ve learned in these grammar stages and lessons. That’s why they make the perfect second job to do when you have done your reviews.

We’ve also created a comprehensible and practical Chinese grammar app. The app focuses only on grammar lessons. You can download the app for Android here: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.chinesegrammar&hl=en_US

#3 – Take advantage of your reviews: Train to speak Chinese as much as you need

The third essential thing you should do is put yourself in situation. After you have practiced sentences building with the grammar stages (and your reviews), here’s how to continue getting the best out of your learning efforts: continue using the Chinese characters. Keep seeing them used in sentences and using them in situations to convey what you want. The dialogues on Ninchanese are perfect for that. You’ll practice speaking Chinese in a context, through an actual complete sequenced dialogue of a given situation.

Sometimes it’s hard to know what word to use, especially when you know several with close meanings. Using them and gaining the habit of using them in set situations will complete your understanding of the word’s entire meanings. That, in turns, reinforces your memory on the character.

Benefits of speaking Chinese sentence with words.

There is still one area of a Chinese character learning you need to work on: pronouncing it. That one is not easy and it takes time to learn to use the right tone each time you say a character. Learning the pinyin (and using numbers or remembering its tone can help) is an excellent way to learn how to pronounce a word. But the best method to remember the tone is to say it. You can’t beat actual real training when it comes to learning how to speak it with your mouth (and not only in your brain) to remember how to pronounce it. The speaking stages on Ninchanese are puurfect for that.

I just spoke about the speaking feature of the dialogues, but the listening mode is also a great way to practice your knowledge of Chinese characters and reinforces their use and graphical meaning as you look for them when writing.

Let’s see what a real example of the benefits of using the app with these pieces of advice.

Recently I spoke with another of our learners, Oisin. It’s interesting to study his case because he was using Ninchanese differently than how we thought it would/should be used. Oisin used Ninchanese only to learn grammar points and do the speaking stages. He never did his reviews.

Having already studied some Chinese before, he unlocked Chinese characters quickly in the first worlds but then he started having some difficulties in the world 4 and even more so in world 5. That’s when he reached out to us.

So we had a conversation about his stumbling blocks, and I understood he was learning without taking into account all the logical relations we’d built between the vocabulary, grammar, and dialogue stages.

And then, I asked him to redo Ninchanese’s first worlds, and to do it a little differently: I asked him to do his reviews stage by stage, coupled with time attacks, the grammar stages, and dialogue stages this time.

So he went from doing no reviews at all to doing them all stage by stage. Let’s see his memory progression on these next graphs:

Picture One – all grey

As you can see, all the little cubes are grey. Each cube represents his memory level for a word unlocked on the app. The colors range from grey to red to orange to green. If it’s all green, then it’s all good.

After two weeks of using Ninchanese and following the learning roadmap I laid out for him, here’s what his memory graph is starting to look like:

Picture two – half green with some red

The graph definitely has a green tint to it now. Overall, this user knows his words pretty well, but we can see that not every word is well-known yet. Yellow cubes (getting there) are starting to point out and red cubes are flourishing here and there.

Let’s see the last graph, taken a week later (so we’re 3 weeks in). It’s interesting to look at, as, as you can see, things are more than a little different.

Picture 3 – Mostly green and some red

With one more week of studying and reviewing under his belt, almost all his HSK 1 and 2 words are known, and well. Now, he is starting to get more red cubes since he is starting to really learn some words at his level. So we can see him progressively learning new words and making the other less known from last week all green!

See how green they are? Doing his reviews has really enabled him to know these words better. You can also see that he’s started reviewing words from higher levels as well, but these are less well known. There are isolated green cubes, and red squares popping up here and there.

What does that tell us? It shows us that he’s starting to have knowledge and to more or less understand words at his level of Chinese.
This snapshot of his memory level also gives us a clearer idea of why he was beginning to run into difficulties, going from being an intermediate learner to reaching an advanced Chinese level.

First, by doing his reviews, Oisin understood the “primal” meaning and pronunciation of Characters. Secondly, by also doing the associated stages in the grammar and dialogues area, he is making progress faster into memorizing words.

The lesson to be learned here: even if you already know some words, have studied a little Chinese before, or you think you have a memory problem, it’s by doing your reviews on time, coupled with doing the contextual stages, such as grammar and the dialogues, that you’ll ensure the Chinese characters you learn stick more than anything.

Conclusion

All in all, to those wondering: have I done enough if I finished my reviews?

The answer is yes! Vocabulary-wise, you’ve done well. You can trust our learning system to make sure you get what you need to learn well.

However, I can’t stress enough that while reviews are important, there’s not all that’s to be learned. Don’t just stick to vocabulary! You want to complete your Chinese character learning by using the time attacks, grammar, and dialogues stages on Ninchanese to learn Chinese fully.

All these stages are complementary to your education and essential to memorize Chinese better. You can’t only learn the Chinese characters to speak Chinese. The Chinese language can’t be just that; it’s a whole language you need to acquire in all its aspects.

And if you believe you have a memory problem, then instead of feeling you have to train more, focus on training better. Finally, I recommend you to have a learning plan to use the app and stick to it. Adapt your program as you learn but keep using it.

I hope it will help you succeed in learning Chinese and if you need any help, let me know. Happy to create a learning roadmap for you!

Jean-Rémi

NinchaneseShould I do more than my daily Chinese character learning reviews? If yes, then what?

2 comments

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  • zcjtrfo - April 12, 2019

    This is a really insightful post. I’ve used SRS before to learn other topics and am convinced that it’s the most powerful tool for developing your long-term memory. Even when you forget a character for the tenth or twentieth time, you can trust the system to give you enough exposure to it so that it eventually becomes familiar – always making sure you aren’t bogged down by wading through characters that you’re already comfortable with.

    The memory visualization grids are beautiful things. Are there any plans to make these available to the user?

    I think it would be really rewarding to browse through snapshots of our memory banks so that we can physically see our knowledge flourish over time.


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