A couple of days ago, John Pasden asked me to write a post about EXACTLY (his emphasis, not mine) how I choose material to add to my SRS collection. Ever willing to help out, I started to think about what criteria I have when I’m reading or listening. What I found is that I can explain it just about as well as I can explain how to throw a football – that is, I know that you pick the ball up, hold it a certain way, and throw it, but exactly how my thumb interacts with the laces to get it to spin the way it does is beyond me. I just know how to do it.
Lacking a set of formal rules, I’ve set about to come up with some general principles. First and foremost are these two:
1. Be liberal when adding material.
2. Be liberal when deleting material.
I tend to err on the side of adding something rather than not adding it, but as soon as I feel like the card is just wasting my time, I’m happy to delete it. Being quick to add and quick to delete, I believe, leaves you with a net time saving over pondering whether or not to add a card in the first place.
To be honest, though, I don’t delete very much. Maybe this means that I’ve gotten pretty good at predicting what is going to maintain my interest, or that I have an above-average tolerance for boredom. I’m not sure which (though my degree in political science and fascination with classical languages seems to point toward the latter).
When I look at the difference between the cards I’m now entering for Mandarin (a language I know well) and Cantonese (a language that I’m just starting to learn), however, some patterns are evident.
For Mandarin, where vocabulary acquisition has long since passed the point of diminishing returns, a lot of my sentences are chosen based on the way they’re written, rather than the words they contain. I’ve been reading 《文言语法》 (Classical Chinese Grammar) by 史存直 (Shi Cunzhi) and adding tons of sentences that contain not a single new vocabulary word, but that are written in what I find to be a profoundly clear and elegant way (tangent: is it just me or did people who received their education pre-1949 seriously learn to write, making pretty much everybody who came afterwards read like a total hack?).
Here’s a current example from the book mentioned above:
FRONT:
任何民族的文化都是歷史發展的結果，而不是少數聰明人在突然之間憑空創造出來的，更不是突然從天上掉下來的。
BACK:
rènhé mínzú de wénhuà dōu shì lìshǐ fāzhǎn de jiéguǒ, ér bù shì shǎoshù cōngmíng rén zài tūrán zhī jiān píngkōng chuāngzào chūlái de, gèngbù shì tūrán cóng tiānshàng diào xiàlái de.
憑空 : 毫无根据地
It’s long, and relatively complicated. I picked it because I liked the 少数聪明人在突然之间凭空创造出来的 bit, and 凭空 was new for me (though the meaning was easy enough to pick out from context). If you’re not a decent Mandarin reader then this card seems pretty hard, but if you are it’s just a short exercise in sentence comprehension. This is the sort of card I’d recommend once you’re proficient, with the focus more on how things were said rather than what was said.
For Cantonese, on the other hand, my cards are very much focused on vocabulary acquisition. The cards are short (I shoot for under 10 characters) and contain at least one (and preferably not more than two or three) words that I’m trying to learn. I keep the cards short because, when you’re first starting, long sentences contain multiple pitfalls (i.e., lesser known or unknown material), and each one is a potential point of failure. If a single card contains five new vocabulary words, and you get four of them and miss one, you’ll mark the entire card as failed. If you have five sentences with one new vocabulary word each, and you miss one, you’ve still made progress on the other four. Maintaining that sense of constant progress is extremely important.
I’ll give two examples here because they’re short.
FRONT
重有時間
BACK
zung6 jau5 si4 gaan1
重有 : still have
FRONT
你喺邊？
BACK
nei5 hai2 bin1
Where are you?
I think when you’re beginning with SRS, a good principle is to add the shortest amount of information that still gives you meaning and context (that means more than a single word (because there’s no context in a single word) but a very short phrase will do just fine).
Another important principle is one of usefulness. I think a lot of people see that an SRS can help them remember anything and take that as a challenge to remember everything. As noble as that inclination may be, it’s not particularly time efficient, particularly in the beginning when you have so much else to learn.
These are the things I came up with. I truly wish a had a more cut and dry answer, and I’ll continue to think about it. In the meantime, what do y’all think? If you use SRS regularly, what makes a good item for you?
Related posts:
- More thoughts on Heisig
- Maintaining one language while learning another
- Tips for SRS success
- You’re doing it wrong
- REQUEST: content recommendations for an intermediate Chinese learner
{ 10 comments… read them below or add one }
I think the less obvious insight that you’ve highlighted beautifully is #2, “Be liberal when deleting material.” This is not an obvious thing to do, but to extensive readers it is a very familiar process: you will not get through the novel without plowing through many sentences that you don’t understand. You just have to get a feel for what to keep and what to throw away. This is a very natural thing that matches the way our brains work; forgetting is a not-very-well-understood but vital brain function, and it should inform the way we study as well.
Thanks for writing up the post!
I agree with Micah that “be liberal when deleting material” is a very important point, and I think my failure to adhere to this point is the main reason why I have yet to really get into SRS. When you don’t delete those near-useless obscure phrases that you added on a whim, and they start piling up and souring all your review sessions, it really makes SRS into much more of a chore.
I also find it interesting that for Mandarin you’re basically using SRS as a reading comprehension exercise (in sentence structure). I’ve always felt that reading comprehension is best improved by just more reading, and when I create SRS cards I focus more on vocabulary, set phrases, and patterns I want to acquire in my own speech.
So is your goal for making a card like that eventually being able to form similar structures in your own speech or writing? Also, if you already know all the words in the sentence, then how to you evaluate yourself on your knowledge of the card? Do you just employ SRS as a method of regularly exposing yourself to the pattern (and so you just mark it “good” every time)? If that’s the case, it strikes me as quite different from how most people use SRS.
The Mandarin cards aren’t really reading comprehension. Save for 古文, there aren’t really any sentences out there that I understand every word of but whose meaning I don’t understand (unless I’m missing some background cultural knowledge, etc.). They are more, as you say, to imprint the patterns contained within them.
The sentences that I enter that contain no unknown words at all are, as you suggest, a way to selectively reinforce certain patterns. Eventually, though, every sentence (in theory; hopefully!) becomes an exercise is reading comprehension as you learn the once unknown words within them. Those pattern cards are just starting out there, instead of reaching them after a month or so of reps.
Good post. I find it interesting to see your examples, as most people tend to do pinyin -> characters instead of characters -> pinyin. Just to get more writing practice and not becoming too lazy only reading stuff.
Is that what most people do? I tried it for a while, based on the AJATT post mentioning it, and while I think it does greatly improve one’s ability to reproduce characters from memory, it also hugely increases review time load. What’s more, it inverts the relationship between the skill you’re practicing and the usefulness of the skill — that is, reading is several orders of magnitude more important than handwriting for most people (even in their native language), but the handwriting part of your reviews is what takes up the most time.
I find the suspend button (well, shortcut) very useful in Anki … every month or so I’ll go through stuff I’ve suspended and decide if I should delete it, keep it on hold, or restructure it a bit to make it more useful.
The one biggest barrier that keeps me from using an SRS more than I do is the hassle of inputting cards. I’ve had great success using a downloaded RTK deck along with the book and a few other pre-prepared decks, but I’ve never been able to consistently make myself add cards on my own. For the most part, I just put in words or phrases that keep coming up again and again… mostly from my book about dinosaurs for Taiwanese kids and random stuff I run into in マリオ ギャラクシー.
My own simple observations (and my approach) to Mandarin Study.
I think it naturally goes that you start small and go bigger and bigger.
1) Characters
2) sounds of combinations
3) words
4) phrases
5) combined phrases (which in many cases is just sentences)
6) And of course as numbers 4 and 5 is coming at you fast and furious, you need to filter down the possibilities (now you are into a probability game). And that is done by CONTEXT – Very important.
Context allows you
1) narrow down possibilities for the word that was said, and maybe more importantly
2) fill in gaps where you missed things more easily, context clues.
As for study, I only study sentences now rather than words, as having the words in context gets you the rhythm of the sentence, provides insights in to grammar usage, and puts the word in a place that is anchored with other words and meanings (i.e., more neural connection anchors to aid in memorization).
(tangent: is it just me or did people who received their education pre-1949 seriously learned to write, making pretty much everybody who came afterwards read like a total hack?)
YES. Seriously.
Unrelated to the post at large, but if you’re reading about classical Chinese, I’d recommend picking up a copy of 汉语史稿 by 王力, and the Outline of Classical Chinese Grammar by Edwin Pulleyblank. (I picked up a Chinese translation of the latter here; no idea whether or not the English version is available.) The Wang Li book is long and not really a textbook so much as a history of the language; it’s very nicely written, and as a bonus has got a number of clearly mandatory footnotes citing Stalin’s texts on historical linguistics. (The book was published in 1958.)
Thanks for the recommendations. I like 王力 — I read through a polished collection of seminars he gave on language (in the 50s, with a great many references to Zhou Enlai and the boys) on a flight home from Beijing once.
I’ve not been able to find the Pulleyblank book in either the original or translation. I can find the translation on various online booksellers’ sites, but none of them have it in stock. Will keep digging…