Do you use rote learning sentences a a learning technique, ie:

http://www.alljapaneseallthetime.com/blog/i-just-dont-feel-like-doing-sentence-reps-any-more-dude

Yes.

Yes, but I do it in a more situational context.

I create notecards with a statement, question or topic. Then place as many responses with grammatical variation on the back. I go through using my sentences as guidelines until I'm comfortable without them and I'm able to generate my own dynamic response.

@mcfarljw that sounds like a great idea. Could you maybe post a full example?

no

太麻烦了

Follow up to this, it does seem too 麻烦 to me as well. How many words/characters were you up to when you started studying sentences?

I wan't to start including sentence study but at the moment it seems like it would not be possible due to not knowing 25-50% of words in a typical sentence.

@董雅各: Zero. The first two sentences I learned in Chinese were "你好?" and "那是什么？" and at that point I knew zero characters.

Whenever I start to study a language I study sentences from the very beginning. (I am currently studying Mandarin, Russian, and Portuguese; I already learned Spanish using this technique.) My philosophy is that a) you always want to have something useful to say in conversation, and words are not enough for communication; b) a large proportion of words, even two- or three-character words, really need to be learned in context rather than from dictionary meanings; and c) studying words in isolation doesn't teach grammar, but studying sentences and phrases does.

I believe 穆儿 is running into a problem with characters which have different meanings associated with different pinyin. This is not an issue with a sentence, because the extra context makes it clear which meaning is being used. But I don't believe him when he says "no"; he knows a lot of 成语 and other Chinese idioms, which certainly count as sentences.

I also find a very big payoff from studying polite phrases specifically; native speakers really like it, and it will often stimulate them to respond in their native language.

I don't know if it's more efficient, but I certainly find that I learn words and characters more easily when I have a larger context to fit them into. I learned the sentence "这段城墙只是从前防御工事的一部分" in pinyin before I learned the individual characters; when I studied 城墙 and 防御工事 on Skritter I had that extra context to attach them to, which aids memorization.

James

I use Anki for this. I put example sentences containing new vocabulary along with an audio pronunciation of the new word on the question side, on the answer side I put a Chinese dictionary definition. Copying and pasting from nciku I can make a card for a word in under 10 seconds, so it's not a problem even when studying a large amount of vocab.

When you study single words outside of any context it's hard to develop a natural feel for the meaning and usage of the word, and easy to develop a way of thinking where you see or say a Chinese word and immediately think of the English equivalent. This is not terribly ideal.

Additionally, lately I've been using Anki's sound recorder to record bits of online tv containing new vocab or interesting phrases. I put the audio on the question card, and the definitions for whatever I want to learn on the answer card. This is pretty effective, though the obvious drawbacks are it's sorta random what you learn, and it's more a side benefit than a main study method.

What is the quickest way to get a list of word meanings from a sentence? I tried pasting a sentence into nciku and what comes out is not easy to copy and paste into anki?

[1]
When I say 太麻烦了 I simply mean that much of this learning method can be replaced with more entertaining and natural ways of learning Chinese.

Studying sentences might be much more efficient but it's less natural. Listening to the radio and watching TV (not passively, of course) has a similar effect.

I don't refute the fact that studying sentences can be enormously helpful.

[2]
As for the characters with different pinyin, even extra context does not necessarily make it clear in all cases.

[3]
Up to now, I haven't systematically used this website to study idioms or chengyu (only how they're written). I just used the website to get my writing skills to the level of my speaking skills.


Now that I've just begun to study definitions on Skritter, sentences wouldn't only be a good addition, they are almost essential (not necessarily to learn them directly but to show how words are used in context).
Something like the mnemonics function could be ideal, and some users are already using it like this.

http://batterseapower.github.com/pinyin-toolkit/

this can take some of the pain out of putting sentences into anki.

One of the things it can do is automatically generate the pinyin for the sentence you enter. It does get some really basic ones wrong, but is still worth using.

no - unless there is something particularly new and interesting.

But I am still using the 22000 sentences that came up on the forum a while ago as a reference for examples of how to use a word.

I memorise spoken phrases, but not written ones. I think this is mostly because my characters are still a way behind my speech, and partly because my memory works better with sound.
This works fine for most purposes, but of course I have to look some characters up. One that really bugs me at the moment is the difference between 作 and 做 .
When to use which?
Rachael.

Memorise 10 sentences with 作 in it and 10 sentences with 做 in it, and you get the idea without having to look in a dictionary (:

Yeah 董雅各 is completely right. If you want to learn all the nuances of a word like 上, learn multiple sentences that use it in different ways. I am often surprised to find out what characters really mean. For example, I learned that 手 meant "hand" and it does definitely mean that. But it also has the meaning "expert" in words like 先手 and 歌手. This is the kind of thing that you can't retain by looking it up in the dictionary and seeing it a single time; you have to somehow solidify the memory of that alternative meaning.

@jww1066 - i have heard 高手used a lot as expert. Looking up 先手/后手 seems to be related to hands, as in a hand of cards, but for Chinese chess.

@Neil my mistake, that should have been 选手.