This is a question for James, and anyone using an SRS program for sentence and vocabulary practice.

Mine is a really basic question. I want to use an SRS program (in addition to Skritter) for drilling new words and sentences I come across. How do I get started? What kinds of questions/answers/definitions do *you* use? What does your daily routine look like?

The big three programs I see talked about are Anki, SuperMemo, Mnemosyne. Is one of these better than the rest?

I'm also interested in this. At the moment I just put sentences (usually from Chinesepod) into Anki. One part is hanzi, the other part is English... Haven't tried any of the others.

Personally, using Anki for sentence practice is one of the three main things I use for ongoing practice. (The other two being skritter and chinesepod).

I played around with a couple of the SRS programs, but ultimately Anki felt the most intuitive to me and has been great for doing everything I need.

The idealized version of my routine is:
Listen to a listen on chinesepod,
Add that lesson to skritter,
Go through the dialog and expansion sentences with meanings hidden. Any sentence I can't immediately understand I download the audio file for (the only way I've found to do this is using the cacheviewer add-on in firefox). I then make a card in Anki with the audio as the question and the writing/English as the answer. I also try to add a vaguely related image as a part of the question to keep myself focused.

I got the method from here:
http://www.alljapaneseallthetime.com/blog/chinese-project-notes-11-constant-improvement-srs-image-hack

I find it really helps in identifying words in a sentence, and keeping them in some context, rather then just studying individual vocabulary. Especially when skritter reinforces the word level understanding.

The chinesepod glossary is also great for any new word you want to learn. You can easily use it to find audio and translations of a couple sentences that use that word.

That's my 2-cents!

Skritter has writing 汉字 completely covered. That leaves reading, listening, and speaking. If you can produce the pinyin from the English, and if you know how to pronounce the pinyin, then you can speak. If you can produce the English and pinyin from the 汉字,　then you can read. Khatzumoto-style sentence practice, like jcardenio described above, would cover listening.

I use Anki and like it. I haven't used Mnemosyne. I played with Supermemo and hated the user interface. I imagine they can all do similar things. However, Anki has a couple of useful plugins for Mandarin. One allows you to type pinyin tone numbers and have it match tone marks. Other useful ones are the Pinyin Toolkit and the Mandarin Toolkit.

I do sentence practice a little differently than Khatzumoto and jcardenio. I start with a sentence which has translations in English and Chinese, ideally both 汉字 and pinyin. I then add an entry with three fields:

Expression: 一朵鲜华插在牛粪上
　　Pinyin: yi4 duo3 xian1 hua1 cha1 zai4 niu2 fen4 shang4
English meaning: A fresh flower growing on cow dung [a beautiful or talented woman who marries an ugly or untalented husband]

As some evidence that the method is useful, I was able to write the above phrase and its pinyin from memory, although I did go check it to make sure I had it right.

I tell Anki to generate three questions from that. One question presents the 汉字 and I have to think of the English meaning. Another question presents the 汉字　and I have to type the pinyin; Anki will highlight any errors I make. Finally Anki will present the English meaning and I have to type the pinyin.

You can put phrases and sentences into Skritter if you want. If you turn on reading and definition practice you can cover several of the bases above, although reading practice mode may still have some UI problems with long phrases. You would still need Anki or something similar for the English-to-pinyin and audio-to-pinyin directions.

As for my daily routine, I don't really have one. I am also actively studying Russian and Portuguese (and Spanish, but that's now in maintenance mode) so there are some days and even weeks when I don't study Chinese at all.

There are a number of technical details that I'm leaving out for brevity. Feel free to email me at jww1066 [at] gmail.com if you want more details.

James

James, I think I will.

After I wrote the message above I downloaded Mnemosyne and started playing around with it. Wow. Khatz and the other SRS-pushers aren't kidding. This system is extremely powerful. It's crazy that a program this useful (like Anki) is completely free.

I downloaded some plugins before I got started, including one that automatically added tone marks to my pinyin. Then I installed the program and set my default language to Chinese.

Getting started. The first thing I did was post words for actual readings I was working on. If I was reading through a lesson, but hesitated on a word, then I'd make an entry out of it. in. So like this:

Q: 满
A: ( man3 ) full; packed 停车场差不多都满了。

...in which the sentence above was straight out of the book I was reading. For me, this is definition practice ++. Not only do I drill the word's pronunciation and meaning, but I get to see the word in context.

The second thing was to plug in some 姓名. I'm terrible with names, and living in China only makes things worse. Everyone in China is called 老谁、小谁, or simply by their relation. Although I know tons of people, I never learn their real names. So I wrote some cards like this:

Q: 我爸爸叫...
A: (他的名字)

Q: 我舅舅叫...
Q: 表妹叫...
Q: 南京的小樊叫...
A: (他们的名字)

The third and final thing I had some questions about; maybe someone can help me with this. I wanted to add sentences that struck me as interesting. A lot of time while reading, I'll come across a sentence that gives me pause, even if I know the words and grammar already. I made up some cards like this:

Q: 他高兴得唱起歌来了。
A: [blank], or 唱起歌来 (which was the part I found interesting)

Q: 请到五号门上飞机。
A: Please board at Gate #5.

How do grade something like this? It's not a matter of understanding (or right/wrong), since the sentence makes sense to me already. I just want to see it again--for familiarity's sake, I guess.

I haven't yet done this, but can already see how this program could be useful for building my general knowledge of China. So things like:

Q: 安徽的首都是...
Q: 江泽民是...
etc, etc...

I like jcardenio's suggestion a lot. But I don't use ChinesePod, so I don't have any audio sentences to test on...

James, God bless you for learning a dozen languages at once :-D I do want to ask--Why do you test yourself on pinyin? You seem pretty far along from what I can tell. In my experience, I make plenty of tone and pronunciation mistakes while speaking, but when typing Chinese (even with tones) I rarely err.

Just three people so far. Anyone else have experience using an SRS program?

I came up with a new kind of a question. Sometimes I confuse pairs of characters, i.e., mistake one for the other. 因-困 ; 货-贷 -- that sort of thing. So I came up with this card:

Q: 有很多事儿 vs. 不记得
A: 忙 (mang2), 忘 (wang4)

The idea is that of course I know the answer, but the question will make me stop and think which character is which. For organization, I put the question in a category called 需要手写. I'll do this for all writing-based questions; that way, I can turn them off when I don't have a pencil around.

I'm also using Chinese definitions as much as I can (有很多事儿, not "busy"; 不记得, instead of "to forget"). Trying to stay in Chinese as much as I can. Hopefully this will pay off in the long run...

I also use an SRS for sentence practice, to improve my grammar and learn how to use words in context. My examples come from either ChinesePod or nciku.

I tried SuperMemo first and, like James, didn't like the interface. I tried Mnemosyne and remember it being OK, but Anki is the most pleasant and straightforward.

I use sentences in Chinese as the question, with pinyin and English as the answer. As sentences come up, I write them out by hand and grade according to how well I understand them. I'm not overly fussy about grading and don't explicitly try to memorize sentences. I assume that if I do enough sentences then over time I'll pick up the sentence structure.

Although there are a lot of options in Anki, I like to keep things as simple as possible. I can't be bothered to put in sound files as I feel I spend my time better practising rather than setting up cards.

I too settled on Anki after trying out several SRS programs.

My bread and butter Anki cards are cloze flashcards - I delete one word or phrase from a Chinese sentence, and accompany that with the missing word defined in English. For instance:

Q:
我说着，又把枕头 _ 过来。
to move; to shift

A:
挪
nuo2
我说着，又把枕头挪过来。

I try to make each flash card test a single fact and try to make sure that the fact has a precise, simple answer, and if I'm taking too long to master a card, I'll add hints to the question, i.e. instead of just two blanks, have r_ _ to prompt for 然而. As far as reading goes, I only do single character flashcards - for word-length recognition, I just try to read a lot.

@murrayjames: No, I'm still a beginner. I make lots and lots of mistakes when I start learning a new sentence's pinyin.

You say you have

Q: 满
A: ( man3 ) full; packed 停车场差不多都满了。

I wouldn't do it like this. First, the question is just one single character, and single characters can have multiple readings and multiple meanings. What do you do in this case? Second, there are several distinct facts buried in one answer, so you could profitably split this up into multiple questions: what's the pinyin? what's the definition? what's the sample sentence?

See
http://www.supermemo.com/articles/20rules.htm#minimum information principle

There's another efficiency issue; when you learn a sentence, you can learn multiple new characters at the same time. For example, when I learned 一朵鲜华插在牛粪上 I didn't know 插 or 粪, but now I do.

I used to study huge chunks of text when I was learning Spanish, and while it was excellent for getting the overall structure down it meant a lot of repetitions of the parts I already knew. Now I try to keep my sentences to a line or less, and I try to separate independent things, just in the interest of making good use of my time.

As for how to grade

Q: 请到五号门上飞机。
A: Please board at Gate #5.

mark it wrong if you got any details wrong (wrong gate number, whatever) and otherwise mark it right. It's not so important to be precise when translating to your native language; as long as you have the correct understanding you should mark it right and move on.

James

Hey James,

I converted my word cards into sentence cards. You were right--it's better this way. Thanks for that Supermemo link. It was helpful.

My sentences are all taken from stuff I'm currently reading. Some sentences focus around grammatical structures. Others are for learning new vocabulary in context. Sentences like:

Q: 一天，她做了一个肉丝炒竹笋。
A: 肉丝炒竹笋 - rou4si1 chao3 zhu2sun3
竹笋 - bamboo shoots

Even far out sentences, like:

Q: 上帝就派了两个神仙把两座山背走了。
A: 神仙 - immortal; supernatural entity

One thing I've found--I like studying sentences more than studying words in isolation. So long as my sentences are sorta interesting, I don't mind seeing them again and again. It also allows me to move on to new material. Instead of reading lesson two or three times over, anything I want to review I just put in the SRS.

Two helpful articles on SRS sentences here:

http://www.antimoon.com/how/usingsm-makeitems-sentence.htm

http://www.antimoon.com/how/examplesent.htm

Glad to hear it. The weirder the sentences, the better. Don't be afraid to learn something offensive, sexual, racist, whatever - the extra emotional associations will help you remember.

I am studying a lot of words here on Skritter and when a word isn't quite self-explanatory I look it up on nciku and add one or two example sentences to my Anki deck. For example, Skritter says 而且 means "moreover; in addition; as well as" but this doesn't quite tell you how to use it. Nciku has a couple of example sentences that make its use completely clear:

http://www.nciku.com/search/zh/detail/%E8%80%8C%E4%B8%94/1303786

James