My method for making flashcards

Things seem to be moving quickly of late with regard to study method. I've almost ditched the idea of completing the Smart FM goals (yes, it does seem pointless to set a goal only to ditch it) but I think I've come up with a better method.

I need to really nail those basic sentences and get the pronunciation down pat for the Chinese. So I've started data mining sentences to put into my Anki flashcard deck.

Basically, if I find a word I think is important, say "important" for example, I'll search for sentences that contain the word "important", mostly from tatoeba and nciku. The sentences need to be fairly straightforward, and not contain other new vocabulary that I'll need to learn on top of "important". This way, when I go over the card, I can concentrate on the sentence, the word, and the pronunciation. If the sentence contains recently studied words or grammar that's even better.

I then collate these sentences and put them into anki. Over the course of a day I might add 10-30 new sentences which cover anywhere from 3 -10 new words or phrases.

The final stage of this process is putting the sentences up on Rhino Spike to get a native speaker to make a recording. I haven't really worked out the best way to do this yet, but I've got a few in the Anki deck already, and these sentences in particular really stick when it comes to having to review them.

The only possible sticking point with this method I can see so far is the number of Chinese speakers who use Rhino Spike. It's not a great number at the moment, and the sentences generally take a few weeks to get recorded. Hence my previous post attempting to recruit through a Chinese social networking language sites who's name I won't mention for now.

Anyway, all is good at the moment. Feel positive about this. Just need to knuckle down and start getting through the flashcards.

Journal writing deleted on italki

I wrote a journal entry on italki about the audio recording site Rhino Spike.

Admittedly, although I claimed to be sharing the benefits of the site with italki users, my reasons for writing it were self-serving.

I uploaded a load of Chinese Mandarin sentences on Rhino Spike that I wanted recording to put with my Anki flash cards, to help with my mandarin pronunciation.

These haven't been recorded yet, so I figured I'd try and get a few more Mandarin speakers using the site by writing a little piece about it in Mandarin and posting it on italki.

Anyway, I just received a message from another user telling me that she just saw my entry moments before it was deleted (by the administrators we presume).

Why would they do this?

They don't want competition from other language sites?

These two sites are hardly in direct competition. And I'd have thought if italki really wanted to help their users, they'd at least encourage this sort of information sharing.

Seems like overkill on their part to me. They see another website being talked about and they immedietely delete the entry?

Is this what the internet is about?

Or is Rhino Spike a blacklisted site in mainland China?

I can't really see why.

Anyway, here's my entry for those poor souls at italki!

一个实用的网站

我觉得这个网的概念非常好。

大家知道这个网站马？

http://rhinospike.com

你的想听的外语文章能录被讲母语的人录下来。

我想录的上载句子很多。

你有空就看看一下这个网站

Taking stock

I have come to a few conclusions about myself and my method of study over the past couple of days. Not sure what has brought this on. Guess it was just time for these things to occur to me.  Here are a few of the highlights:

I am a bit of a daydreamer.

I don’t concentrate hard enough when I study.

I am not concentrating on important things that are important for communication.

I am studying language that is too difficult, language that I will not be able to use because I do not have the foundations to get to a point in a conversation to use this language.

I need to practice basic sentences, and focus on sentences that are useful in communication.

I need to work with Anki more to practice lots and lots of basic sentences, to get myself confident with these, so I have the foundations to move further on.

I need to focus on Chinese or Japanese.

I want to focus on Chinese because I think I have more interest in China and more motivation to learn the language.

I need to study hard, and by this I mean focus hard, and get myself thinking about the language and challenging myself to produce the language more.


Ditching Japanese seems like a big step, and will be hard seeing that I live in Japan (for now). But I think as far as individual study goes, I want to focus exclusively on Chinese. I have the drive to do this, and when I study Japanese it feels like I am wasting time that I could be using to study Chinese. So I’m going to get rid of, or at least hide, all the Japanese language books I have in my apartment and focus on Chinese.