My issue is as follows:

- I have a 2 hour Chinese class using New Practical Chinese Reader every day, which has been booked until March 16;
- Characters are being added at an average rate of about 30 a day (while the target goal was only 10 a day);
- After I return home from work I have 4 to 5 hours to study;
- My teacher wants me to dedicate half that time to reviewing the lessons, doing the exercises and reviewing all vocabulary up till now;
- The other half of my time she wants me to learn the characters through rote memorization, by writing them 10 times each and pronouncing them once. She insist that mnemonics should only be necessary for those characters I have particular difficulty with, saying things like "Chinese children learn it this way. I learned it this way. You should be able to do the same." ;
- As of today, I have learned 116 characters (I had to do the 40 characters of NPCR lesson 10 through the rote memorization method in Paint yesterday because Skritter was unavailable to me);
- Adding yesterday's 40 characters, I am currently 147 characters behind in Skritter and failing to keep up;
- I told my teacher that I expect to have a big problem once we start with book 2 next week. Starting with book 2, there will be no more pinyin. However, she insists that that will not be an issue, saying things like "If you don't know a character, I will just tell you." and "Your expectations are too high. You can't expect to know all the words and characters at the end of this book. Just relax. I think you are doing great." (after having completely effed up lesson 10 and 11 and being unable to read half of the characters), etc. But with only knowing 50% or so of the characters that I should know by the end of book 1, I expect that she will have to step in quite a lot.

My questions are:

- Is there anyone else who has done or is doing a textbook series and is/has been in a similar situation?
- How did you cope with your backlog in Skritter? Some days I barely have enough time to do the reviews, nevermind to study the new characters.
- What would you suggest in my situation? I have already decided to have only a one hour session every Tuesday and Thursday from March 19 onwards, to allow me to catch up with my backlog. The teacher has already slowed down considerably by putting extra emphasis on the tones, but it is still too fast. I would like to stop at the end of book 1 and review everything again from the beginning, allowing me some more time to catch up, but she insists that I should do my reviewing at home and wants to continue with book 2. :-/

I think the problem is you are going incredibly fast by any measure, so your teacher is right that if even half of it sticks it will be a pretty good feat for a short period of time.

As I see it the problem is that you are studying a single textbook and really hammering out lessons daily, which means you are constantly flooded with new content. A preferable method is to study a chapter a day, but then study complimentary materials on the follow day(s), such as similar chapters from other textbooks, native material at a basic level (children's books), etc, which means you are reinforcing the same basic words instead of just learning more and more each day.

30 a day isn't sustainable for very long IMHO; I study pretty seriously (on my own) and I find 100 a week to be ambitious but possible over the long term, although 10 a day is more manageable. Either you should readjust your expectations for how much you need to remember without feeling disappointed, or you should adjust the pace of the course so that you are learning lessons thoroughly and not just forgetting all the vocabulary by the next book.

And regarding backlog, the only solution is heavy sessions. After my new years holiday I came home to 5500 pending reviews; banged them out in 3 days over a weekend at around 2-4 hours a day. Not that fun, but a better solution than just ignoring them (I normally Skritter 30 minutes a day and it would have taken forever to clear them at that rate...).

I agree with icebear; 30 characters per day is not sustainable. My averages are about the same as his/hers, with 100 words in a good week but 10 words per day as an average. That's my word count; my character count is much lower, but in the beginning stages of learning these two numbers will probably be pretty close. It sounds to me like you are going too fast and you realize this, but your teacher is unwilling to slow down. Frankly, I would either force her to adapt to your needs or find another teacher. By the way, I took a class that used NPCR books 3 and 4, and my teacher covered one lesson for roughly every 12-16 hours of class.

30 a day ?
I had/ am having trouble keeping on top of 30 a week especially with learning the grammar and use contexts at the same time , plus couple of engineering subjects and 30 hours work a week.

For a big backlog , rather than long heavy sessions, I found it better to do lots of short ones.
5 -10 minutes an hour for every hour you are awake

Do you have the video's for npcr ?

They were on the web in a few locations but seem to have been taken down.

They are still on youtube
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UAZQbxrBjgY&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mq2KsZ0UMdo
(firefox with download helper or video downloader if you need to save them)

Agreed that many 10 minute Skritter sessions are advantageous to one super long one. Also, while it may seem daunting at first, I think the 5-10 a day pace is pretty manageable for most learners (once they have picked up momentum). I mean words, not characters (I hit around 30 characters a week, sometimes less).

Thank you for all your replies. I had no problem with learning 100 characters the first week, but that was with 3-4 hours (5-6 hours during the weekend) of nothing but characters every day (including etymological and historical research and writing a proper explanation for each character). I had a lot of fun with that. Too much fun, according to my teacher. And she was right. Sometimes I lost myself in the character research to such an extent that I did not have any time anymore to review the last lesson. But rote memorization when you have something like Skritter at your disposal seems like sheer lunacy. I read that it might be advantageous to use pen and paper in addition to Skritter at a certain point. However, I have no idea what that point may be. I remember from learning French, German, etc. that we often had listening exercises and dictations, but there is none of that in our class.

My teacher told me today that I am crazy for wanting to do this 2 hours a day. "Crazy in love", she said. "Two sessions a week would be plenty and would also give you enough time to review." So I went to italki.com, found the reschedule request option and moved things around so that after another full week of classes next week I will only have class on Tuesday and Thursday. That should enable me to catch up.

@Junglegirl: perhaps you could explain to me how your teacher managed to fill 12-16 hours with just one lesson so I can convey that to mine. What we do in our class is reading the new words, then reading the text with her correcting the tones, her reading and me following in her trail, me translating the text, her giving me sentences in English that I have to translate to Chinese and vice versa, her asking questions in Chinese that I have to answer in Chinese, doing some (most, but not all) of the exercises and reading all the characters.

@alxx: yes, I found the videos on YouTube the day before yesterday. They are a great help. I also have the audio for all the books, which is a great help as well. After I return home, the first thing I do is to review the lesson again while shadowing the audio, followed by watching the video. Then I add any new characters to Skritter and study away. I usually review my vocabulary at work (during breakfast, lunch, toilet breaks, etc. ) - about an hour a day. I guess I spend 7 hours a day working, 8 to 11 hours a day learning Chinese and 5 to 7 hours sleeping. 5:15 until I have to get up again. Hmm... I need more sleep.

split your study time in chinese , signal theory and Embedded systems and thats me


All the vids in one place.
Note works only in internet explorer
http://unclp.org/oneword/xin1/1-1.htm

I looked into their source and found out that you can easily download them using:

http://unclp.org/oneword/xin{book number}/{video number}.wmv

http://unclp.org/oneword/xin1/1-1.wmv
...
http://unclp.org/oneword/xin3/38-2.wmv

I created a full list and provided it here:
http://www.mediafire.com/?0h9xc532bdpzhfk

Password: skritter.

That should keep the creepy crawlies out and the UN safe from mass downloaders - except for us. Use the list with a tool like wget to download the videos all at once.

No browser issues. :-)

The teacher agreed that the new schedule would be far better. We are at lesson 12 of the first book now and will probably complete lesson 14 by next Wednesday.

Signal theory and embedded systems? Interesting! That reminds me of university level textbook on electronics I bought more than 10 years ago. I was surprised to see that the cover was in Chinese. So surprised, in fact, that I bought "Beginner's Chinese" by Yong Ho. I read about the history and structure of the Chinese language as well as Chinese culture with much interest, but the course was useless without any spoken reference for proper pronunciation.

"@Junglegirl: perhaps you could explain to me how your teacher managed to fill 12-16 hours with just one lesson so I can convey that to mine."

It was a group class, which is naturally going to move more slowly than a private one. I actually wouldn't have minded if we had gone a bit faster. But as I recall there were three texts (two dialogues and one essay) in each lesson, so we would spend about a week (4 hours of class time) on each one. We would also usually do an additional reading from the accompanying workbook. We did lots of exercises from the workbook in class, along with some totally unrelated speaking activities, like talking about that week's newspaper headlines.

If the speed is the most important factor, you could try turning down your retention rate. Obviously this has its disadvantages but would allow you to keep on top of the reviews and new characters at such a speed. I'm not sure if turning it back up again later would give you more reviews to increase your knowledge of previously learned characters or not - could be useful.

I live in China, and after 1 1/2 years of studying Chinese with the NPCR, I passed the HSK IV pretty easily. I'm taking HSK V practice tests and I'm pretty sure I could pass it. I'm currently on the 5th NPCR book. With that in mind, here is some advice:

1) Your pace is way too fast. 2 hour sessions EVERY day with a teacher is too much. Way way too much. Teachers are useful to explain the material, correct your pronunciation, and help you with questions. You should be talking and practicing every day, but you don't need a teacher for that. You could listen to Chinese podcasts, go to Chinatown, listen to the NPCR dialogues, etc... every day.

2) Only add to Skritter what you can remember and keep up with. If you add words too fast to satisfy a goal you have, the program will quickly become useless to you. I've done this a few times, and it's a weakness of mine. I'm a big fan of goals and timelines, and I add too fast to Skritter.

If your teacher wants you to study more characters than you can really handle, do it the traditional way that she recommends: writing them on paper 10 times. If they don't stick, it's fine, because adding them to Skritter wouldn't make them stick either - you're going to fast. But at least this way when you use Skritter, it's useful to you.

- - - -
Now here is my studying routine when I was working through NPCR 1 - 4:

1) Complete 1 NPCR lesson a week. After I meet with my teacher to review a lesson, I go home and add all of the vocab for the next lesson. I review the words all week in Skritter, so by the time I have my next session with my teacher, I know the words very well.

2) Have 2 sessions a week with a teacher, 2 hours each. The first session is with the textbook. I read all the dialogues aloud - teacher corrects pronunciation. Then we practice conversation using the topic of the chapter as a starter.

3) For the 2nd session of the week, we go over the workbook.

4) During the week, I listen to the dialogues on CD, practice saying it aloud myself. I also do my own side stuff, such as read young adult books, talk to people, listen to music, and chat on QQ.

If you finish 1 lesson of the NPCR a week, you will finish books 1 - 4 in a year. That would be awesome progress, and twice as fast as a college course. And it's still not as ambitious as what you were doing, meeting the teacher everyday and learning 200+ words a week.

Catherine and atdlouis, thanks for the input. Earlier this week, I agreed with my teacher that a 2 hour session twice a week would be the best way to go.
I find that the characters I do extensive research on tend to stick very well. My teacher insisted on rote memorization only this week, which I gave up on after 5 days. I really enjoy the history behind every character and I'll learn a lot more about Chinese culture if I do it my way. I only learned 22 new characters this weekend so I am 78 behind schedule. I will square those away by learning 2 extra characters a day over the next 5 weeks.
atdlouis, I learn pretty much the same way you did. No Chinatown here. I'm in the middle of the Irish countryside. NPCR vocabulary review is fast and efficient thanks to Pleco Chinese and ready-made vocabulary lists. I only learn the individual characters in Skritter.
I think learning 1.5 to 2 lessons a week should be feasible. I can do the workbook exercises at home. If it still turns out to be too hard, I can always take it down a notch. I want to push myself as hard as possible, while maintaining a good retention rate.
After NPCR 2 and 3 I would like to start reading using Graded Chinese Reader. Does anyone know these textbooks and have a good experience with them? I am also thinking about what to do after NPCR 4. atdlouis, do you find that the 5th book is worthwhile? Are there any good intermediate level textbook series that are recommended after NPCR?

I have both NPCR 5 & 6. They focus on formal, literary Chinese. I'd recommend picking up at least book 5.

The other book I'd recommend is "Advanced Reader of Contemporary Chinese Short Stories." Fantastic book of short stories, with vocab and discussion questions at the end of each story. This book is pretty hard, and I go through about a short story a month.

The last book I'd recommend is Common Chinese Patterns 330. This is a great book - it gives 330 different structures in Chinese, with examples of how they are used as well as exercises for each one. Chinese has a lot of arbitrary structures to convey meaning, and it is difficult to understand the meaning of the structure without someone telling you "this is what it means."

I'm halfway through typing up this book into an excel spread sheet and using it for flash cards in Anki. It has taken my Chinese to a new level.

Keep in mind the NPCR books 1 - 4 contain 50 lessons. When I finished book 4, my Chinese was pretty good. At 1 lesson a week, that's a year. I could have gone faster, but there are other resources you can use to improve your Chinese. While I was using NPCR, I also studied Chinesepod. NPCR is extremely formal, but Chinesepod is modern day language that you can use with your friends and they will be impressed. In the beginning lessons it maybe possible to do 2 lessons a week, but soon the vocabulary becomes very long in the lessons and I think too hard to learn in half a week.

One last thing that I love about NPCR. A lot of the complaints are that it is too formal and will give vocabulary that isn't practical. While this may be the case, everything that you learn is very valuable if you are into learning Chinese for the long-haul. In some of the books, maybe book 2 or 3, you learn lines of ancient Chinese poetry by Du Fu and Li Bai. I thought it was so stupid to learn that, but just to show off for some friends I said the lines of poetry ... and they said the lines before I could finish speaking! I did this a few times before I realized just about everyone in China knew these poems by heart! I wouldn't have realized that unless I got it from NPCR. You learn a lot about Chinese culture with these books.

NPCR is a good series. I only studied up to book four, but they hadn't come out with six when I was studying them. From there I did the complete Short Term Spoken Chinese series and one other more formal book called 汉语精读课本：一年级下. After all of that, I patched up the holes in my vocabulary with the HSK lists and started reading books for Chinese people.

As atdlouis point out, the thing about NPCR is that it is great if you are in it for the long haul. Sooner or later, you will catch yourself using the most obscure items in it. Also, the texts are designed in such a way as to make the learning of characters easier. It is a well designed series, but it is only suitable for people who are in it for the long haul.

I think 1.5 to 2 chapters a week is very reasonable. Assuming you prepare before each class, two hours is more than enough to go through a chapter with your teacher. 约翰, it sounds like your current plan is a good one. I hope it works well for you.

Edit: It is nice to see someone who properly respects text books. So many students abandon them far too quickly. Don't do it. I have talked to a couple of Chinese teachers about this and they seem to agree that at least one complete set of text books is usually required to function in Chinese well. They both preferred one and a half to two complete sets, but few students stick with the books for that long. They can tell when the student has, though. Those students' Chinese is worlds better than the rest of the "advanced" students'.

For reading practice, I have a book from the Foreign Language Teaching and Research Press (FLTRP) Graded Readers - Reading China series. Mine is called Panda Diplomacy and is at the 5A level, which is supposed to be for students who know 5,000 words, but my vocabulary was quite a bit smaller than that when I started it (and still is). There are lower levels too. The stories are pretty interesting, and they have vocab lists, grammar points and exercises too.

@west316: I tried to learn Chinese on my own for 6 months before I started with a teacher and simply got lost. A textbook provides a streamlined path and a certain sense of comfort. You know that - as long as you put in the effort - you will know some 1200 characters and 2400 words at the end the textbook series.

@atdlouis: I found it takes me about 3 days to properly assimilate new vocabulary. So a Tuesday-Friday schedule would probably be better than my current Tuesday-Thursday one.

Thanks for all the Chinese reading suggestions!

I had a major dip this week (went one character down and then plateaud for 3 days due to unexpected circumstances). Got stuck at 177 today, but at least my retention rate has gone back up to 91%. Less lessons in the next two weeks and only workbook exercises so I should be able to catch up. I finally started with the chapter 9 characters today. 5 more chapters and some 150 new characters left to do. Should be able to hammer that out in 2 weeks.

I started to add a "Tone: " line and example words to every mnemonic. Any more tips to help better remember them? I have issues with the pinyin and tones in particular. The characters are logical when you do your homework, but the pinyin and tones make no sense whatsoever. You would think that a culture as great as the Chinese could have included hints to those in their script, but nooooo... :-/

How to remember tones:

When I'm studying, I say the tone out loud, very exaggeratedly. I also use my pointer finger to draw the tone in the air as I speak. I think doing some sort of movement helps encode the memory - that's just my armchair neuroscience analysis, I could be completely wrong.

When I use Chinese in public, I actually wave my finger in the air and draw out the tones as I'm speaking, and it happens very quickly so my finger is fluttering around as I'm speaking at a normal conversational speed. People have told me I speak very clearly, and I attribute this to how well I learned my tones.

The downside is I look like a crazy person.

Also, you have to remember all Chinese people learn how to speak before they can read and write. So tones are already ingrained - they don't have to memorize them. That burden is on us poor foreigners learning the language.

I completed Books 1-4 of the New Practical Chinese Reader, and loved them, but I think that books 5 and 6 live up to the name "Reader" too much - they present readings, ask questions about them, and cover any grammar that happened to appear in them.

Reading into a New China (a two book series) is an organized curriculum for teaching an intermediate student how to read and write formal Chinese, and that's what I've been using as my primary textbook. I have been using NPCR book 5 as reading material, however, and I do like the fact that books 5 and 6 are purely written in Chinese. I understand the reasoning behind using English in Reading into a New China, but since my reading level far outstrips my ability to write compositions in Chinese, it makes the textbook less appropriate for me. Another negative of RINC is that every chapter concerns a social problem in China, which gets old after 20 lessons, while NPCR presents varied and high quality reading material.