Reflections on 5 years of daily Anki for learning Mandarin Chinese

After more than 5 years of daily flashcard practice, I have been having some new thoughts and conclusions about my methods that I would like to share here and invite everyone to discuss. I am sort of assuming the reader is familiar with flashcards as a tool for learning vocabulary, but maybe has not heard of Anki. Anki is a popular application that allows one to create customized flashcards and review them in a spaced repetition manner. Spaced repetition software (SRS) aims to make the learning process efficient by letting the user review cards that they get wrong more often than ones they keep getting right. With that out of the way, let’s start with a short introduction about my history with flashcards before discussing some realizations I recently had about how to improve the usefulness of this daily habit that is so dear to me.

I started learning Chinese in the summer of 2017 and by the end of the year I incorporated daily use of Skritter, a flashcard app for training to write Chinese characters, to learn writing and reading simplified characters into my study routine. By mid 2018 I grew annoyed by Skritter’s focus on practicing single characters and I switched to Anki with my own word-focused cards. Throughout the years I mostly used a single note template that includes the English and Chinese word, pinyin and one or more example sentences and generates cards for both directions English to Chinese and vice versa. The first years I strictly quizzed myself on being able to write the characters in addition to getting the translation and pronunciation right, but over the past years I had to admit that without any real intention to actually handwrite anything the focus on writing hurt my progress in general comprehension, so I stopped being strict on getting the writing right.

As for the words that make into into my Anki deck, a large portion is drawn from books and articles I read, another chunk comes from the unknown words I note down when talking with teachers or other natives. In theory this already provides the context in which the word is encountered naturally, but here comes my first big mistake: As my cards are word-focused, I do not quiz myself on the actual usage of the word, but on the translation, even if I’m always trying to also think of examples while answering. Although I include example sentences on the cards, in practice the actual sentence in which I encountered the word is often lost due to several reasons:

• I only noted the word after it came up in conversation, not the context
• I saved the word when looking it up while reading, but not the sentence
• I pre-learned the word before reading a text without knowing what context it appears in

When choosing example sentences, I mostly just choose some short ones from Pleco that show a few of the different usages of the word. For some words there are many usages and I often include multiple meanings on the English side of the card and then include one example sentence for each meaning. I now believe this is another big mistake, as it makes it harder to judge whether I truly “know” the word and actually just creates an illusion of comprehension. Instead of knowing the word well in the context that is most useful to me, I sort of know it in multiple contexts, but not well enough to actually use it in my own speech or writing. To sum up the mistakes mentioned above, I think my focus on single word translations has outlived its usefulness and has become more and more of an obstacle, especially as I encounter more words similar to ones I already know. As a result, there is a big chunk of words in my vocabulary that I may understand when encountering them in the right context, but that I am not able to appropriately use when speaking. I believe this has contributed to my feeling of stagnation in how I express myself, often reverting to very basic vocabulary although I have studied more appropriate, precise terminology.

Another mistake that seems to be pretty common among my fellow Anki users is the stubbornness to repeatedly quiz myself on words I keep forgetting, but that are also quite useless to me personally, those words I already forgot when and how I added them to the deck and that I have never encountered again in real life since then. There are voices calling for full deletion of one’s Anki deck from time to time, that for sure is one way, but I personally opt for just suspending those cards, so I can potentially reuse them in the future once that word becomes relevant again. The decision to suspend cards continues to be a hard one and I believe I must be more quick to suspend cards for words that have no immediate use to me.

As a consequence of reflecting on my mistakes, I have now switched to writing mostly sentence-based cards, in particular for those verbs and adjectives that have multiple uses. This lets me focus on single uses of words in the context they appear to me when encountering them. There are still many of those cards with multiple meanings in my deck and I set myself the aim to slowly convert those into sentence cards as I encounter them. I also try my best to remove those words I haven’t encountered naturally and I don’t see myself using soon, it feels more easy to make that decision for the English->Chinese cards than the Chinese->English ones (“what if the next novel I read uses this word?”). Speaking of translation directions, for the sentence cards I am still indecisive when to study both directions and when to only quiz English->Chinese (and suspend the other card immediately). Generally it feels more useful to quiz myself on translating to Chinese as its harder and more closely simulates the production skill which I feel is most stagnating.

Check out my original post on chinese-forums.com and the discussion there.