Hey everyone

I have learnt a few things from my studies in psychology that can help improve studying habits. So I was thinking that in the Skritter community there must be tons of people have would have some useful tips on how to improve studying habits and it would be great to hear some of them. Some might be scientific, others just simple sense and again others might be based on personal experience.

I learnt from courses was that if you set yourself a goal (i.e. I want to study more Chinese) it should be as specific as possible (i.e. I will study 1 hour every day from 6-7 in the evening by first writing for half an hour and then doing some listening exercises for another half hour).

Another thing is that if you are having problems with remembering a character, you should try to build a lot of associations with it. The more and the stronger, the better. So if you have problems with remembering how to write the character for toe, think of a story that can help you remember it, then write ten setences in Chinese using that character and then still try to make a short story which you then tell your Chinese friend (and if you still repeat that the next day, and then seven days later, you won't forget it easily:).

What are things you have picked up along the way?

The one set thing I ALWAYS do no matter what, is use supermemo. That's my daily ritual. I put all new vocabulary in there, which for me means I usually have around 200-300 repetitions every day. It usually takes around an hour, assuming I do the final drill. I also try to use Skritter for about 30-60 minutes every day, although sometimes my schedule doesn't permit.

Other than those regularly scheduled activites, I try to cram other stuff in when I have time, such as chatting online in Chinese, having private lessons when I can schedule them, watching Chinese TV shows, listen to various podcasts, etc.

Unfortunately, I don't have as much time for speaking practice, so I feel like my verbal skills are lagging behind. I guess this applies to conversation in general, including comprehension of a lot of day-to-day speech. Obviously the textbook stuff is pretty different from the speech patterns people use in real life.

If only I didn't have to work 50 hours a week, that would certainly make things easier :(

The story method you refer to is well-known; search for "Heisig method" or "learning Chinese characters mnemonics" and you'll find a lot of web sites.

Something I find helpful when I am learning a new or troublesome character with Skritter is to click on "Show", then "Erase". Then I count to 10 and try it again. I repeat this a couple of times with 10 seconds in between. This seems to be very helpful; when Skritter reschedules that character I am much better at getting it right.

James

My verbal skills are also WAY behind my writing/reading skills ! People are really surprised to see that I can easily chat with them in Chinese on Internet (Thx Skritter) but barelly say a words in real, it's a real shame as I'm surrounded by chinese speaking people (my GF included...)

I have a little tip that is really helping me during my learning process: I'm currently reading some Manga (Dragon Ball) in Chinese ! Don't laugh ! The grammar is not too hard, words are quite repetitive and everyone know the story ! With the help of images I virtually understand all what's happening !

Think about it, you all must have a fav' comics that u read during you childhood !

As far as oral skills go, one thing that I've started doing since moving back to the US is going to Chinese conversation clubs (analogous to English corners in China). I found the Mandarin and Spanish clubs that I attend through meetup.com.

jww1066: I'm not sure if this is already what you meant, but you don't have to hit erase, you can just hit the "show" button again to unshow it.

Along that vein I try to click it twice in a row so that I only get a flash of it for a second (unless I REALLY don't know it), to make my brain work harder at remembering it when I write it again.

For those struggling with speaking: there is a program available for free called Speak Good Chinese, but I haven't actually gotten a chance to try it out yet. I get the impression it is for working mostly on your syllables and tones but I'm not 100% sure. (speakgoodchinese.org)

Hobbes828
You're right, you can't just erase if you have only pressed the "show" button. As soon as you, however, have made any sort of mark, you can erase it.

We briefly tried Speak Good Chinese to test out its syllable recognition powers and were extremely unimpressed. If anyone else has good experiences, though, we'd like to hear them. It's potentially something we could do (better) in the future.

Another thing we were thinking of doing is adding some support for penpal matching. We could also do it for Skype exchange, so you could find conversation practice partners on Skritter. What do you think? There's plenty of sites that already do that, and if you want native speakers to practice with, there's chineseteachers.com, but it's something we could do if you guys are interested in practicing with each other.

If we could see other people's profiles, search them, message them, etc. I think it would be easy for us to match ourselves up if we are interested in practicing.

For learning characters- Heisig 'Remembering the Hanzi' and an SRS are the way to go!


Wish skritter had the heisig list, with heisig keywords instead of normal English translations. Would be mighty useful reviewing!

We just got the Remembering the Hanzi volumes in. I'd also be interested in integrating the headword approach into normal practice, although I'm not qualified to do the headword selection. If we can find a way to do that without just ripping off Heisig's headwords, it could be sweet. We'd just bold the headword and leave the rest of the definition there, too.

sorry to hear that about SpeakGoodChinese... guess it will deter me further from installing "build-essentials" on my old and relatively free-space-less laptop to compile it.

I'm not a big fan of the skype or penpal exchange thing. Though with only paid users you would probably get a better result than all the other free language-exchange websites which to me are bloated excuses for dating sites (though I am sure some small percentage of their users are strictly there for language learning).

Maybe like Nicki said about just having an option to have some "profile" viewable which besides the obvious e-mail and msn/googletalk/skype/etc. addresses, might include an option to show (off) your stats, books studying/studied, favorite character, 等等.

I am looking forward to some sort of headword/mnemonic system, mostly for those hard-to-remember characters which while skrittering I end up making up stories for myself.