Sharing this because I've found a strategy I believe has been surprisingly effective and efficient for both practicing Chinese comprehension and reproduction of Hanzi, letting me learn, retain, and reliably reproduce characters at a rate of about 15 per day, while only needing to spend 30-40 minutes on Anki per day. I intend to continue, and reach just under 3000 by the middle of this year. YMMV.
I started learning Chinese perhaps four years ago, but have been shockingly inconsistent at learning since then. I had one decent streak of consistent 汉字 practice about 3 years ago, but since then have let it fall apart completely. In the following time I got a bit of Chinese practice through the occasional conversation, but nothing structured, and certainly no spaced repetition.
About one month ago, I realized I hadn't actually tried to write 汉字 for years, so I gave it a shot. The result shocked me; I couldn't even write basic words like 我 or 是 accurately. I could recognize them with reasonable consistency, but writing was beyond me.
I resolved to fix this, and embarked on an Anki scheme. This is not my first Anki rodeo, and my experience using it for other languages had given me invaluable experience as to how to not waste my time, get buried in leeches, etc. My strategy was:
- ZERO English -> Chinese cards. They're much harder than Chinese -> English, will take up the majority of your time, and IMO aren't even useful. They train you to do something that you're trying to *stop* doing (that is, translating from your NL), so away they go.
- No isolated words, no definitions. I don’t believe in the value of isolated words - we can only deeply learn the meaning of a word through exposure to the contexts in which it is naturally found. It’s the isolated words that killed me my last attempt at building a Chinese Anki deck - I found that they were ‘floating’, if that makes any sense. Not rooted to any salient associations I could hold on to. Mountains of leeches piled up, and I gave up. This time I decided to only use full sentences, and learn the meaning of those sentences. The majority of these sentences were taken from comprehensible input sources (i.e TV shows).
- Hanzi reproduction practiced only via cloze cards. I would see a full sentence that I’d learned with a missing character, and I’d mark correct if I could correctly reproduce it (including stroke order). If the sentence I’d mined contained multiple new 汉字, I would make cloze cards for each of them. This is not a feature natively available on Anki - I downloaded a script called Cloze Anything, which was an absolute life saver. It meant that I could get many cards from a single note, saving much needed time in deck building. There are sentences in my deck that have six or seven cloze cards attached, which can stack up, but I find the extra repetitions have helped remove the strain from the secondary task of recalling meaning, and allowed me to focus on my primary goal of 汉字 reproduction.
- A focus on maximising the strength of visual and semantic associations with every learned item. Every sentence is paired with an image. A lot of the time a screenshot from the show I’d been watching was enough to really build the memories up, but sometimes I felt like the picture didn’t really lock the semantics I was looking for. In these cases I used ChatGPT’s image generation feature to craft very particular images that stored the exact meaning I was looking for. This process, while time consuming (often taking a number of revisions), has been extraordinarily helpful in building associations to vocab, and locking in things like the correct tone and connotations of my target phrases.
- Using FSRS, a comfortably low target retention rate of 81%. I’m not studying for any particular upcoming test, and having a high retention rate is not nearly as important to me as maximising retention *volume* - that is, the total number of items learned multiplied by the probability of recall. A higher retention rate (e.g the standard 90%) would *greatly* increase strain and effort (by 186%, according to the FSRS simulator) for a measly 12.5% increase in volume. Ceteris paribus, I could *greatly* increase volume by lowering retention rate, and spending that extra effort on increasing the quantity of learned items. I feel that this has absolutely paid off.
My results:
- An average recall rate of 81.8%, slightly above my target of 81%.
- 639 cards learned in 31 days, of which 196 were sentence meaning recall cards, and the rest were 汉字 reproduction cards.
- An average of 106 reviews per day, which is much, much lower than the gargantuan 300+ daily card murderdecks that had killed me in the past. A highly manageable quantity, although the average will no doubt increase as the deck gets bigger. The FSRS simulator predicts that as the year goes on the daily reviews will approach 160 or so per day, which is still very manageable. The secret, I've found, is taking the extra time to craft maximally salient cards, and keeping the target retention rate low.
In short this is by far the most effective SRS workflow I’ve ever used, and I intend to continue as long as the results look like this. Reaching 4000+ hanzi before the end of the year seems eminently achievable now, if not an undershot. It depends if I can keep up the workload, of course. I’d strongly recommend anyone finding themselves burning out on Anki too quickly to try this out, as I really need to emphasise that it has not been that hard.
Some other notes:
- Keep in mind that I had… non-zero hanzi recognition skills before I started this. I did *not* learn 440 hanzi in a month from scratch. I doubt such a thing is even possible, and it should not be attempted. If you’re starting from the beginning feel free to do something similar, but start with like.. three per day, five max, until you feel like you’ve got a decent grasp on radicals and stroke order.
- Anki was just the icing on the cake, the real meat and potatoes of my learning sprint was comprehensible input, of which I did a fairly significant amount, maybe two hours per day on average. Started with Peppa Pig, worked my way up and am now struggling my way through Love Game in Eastern Fantasy. The gains have been shockingly fast. Been mainly doing this on Lingopie, which is… an app on which I have many opinions, good and bad. Could write a whole review for that, but it has been very effective for my purpose of just watching lots of subtitled content. But yeah without the comprehensible input backing up the Anki cards there’s no way I’d be able to recall them this easily.
I hope someone finds this useful, and I apologise if this sort of post is repetitive!
Impressive- And all that with only 40 minutes max per day?
He can already read whatever hanzi he's writing. I assume you gotta at least double that if is a completely new hanzi
That's not true. I can read less than half of them. Most of them are completely new.
40 minutes per day of anki reviews, yes. Much more of Chinese practice total.