9 Comments

  1. Manuel Huygen
    October 29, 2014 @ 8:27 pm

    Well told ! A daily habit is important to make progress and you must find your own tricks : listening to chinesepod, reading, watching chinese programs on the web, reviewing flashcards :
    http://www.polybri.com/studying-chinese-1-the-wonders-of-pleco/
    Do it every day, that’s important (that’s why it’s so hard to go back to it after a period of holidays)

    • Furio
      October 30, 2014 @ 1:38 am

      You don’t need holiday : P

  2. Manuel Huygen
    October 30, 2014 @ 3:00 am

    I do, from time to time 🙂

  3. Laura
    October 30, 2014 @ 5:29 am

    It´s been my 4th week studying Mandarin at the University and it has been very intense. We´ll learn up to 1000 words in the first 2 semesters, so it will (or is already becoming) a habit. My problem is to find out the right way to learn all that vocabulary. Does someone have some tips? ^^”

    • Furio
      November 14, 2014 @ 11:28 pm

      Hi Laura,

      sorry for the delay but I saw your comment only now. When it comes to learn and review vocabulary, nothing beats spaced repetition softwares (SRS).

      You create a flashcard for each word and add it to your deck; then you review them every day. Since at the beginning you only have few words, this will take minutes.

      The beauty of SRS is that, for every word, the software asks you to rate how well you can remember it. If you are familiar with the word, you rate it “very well” and the software will then show you that word less and less. If you can’t remember it, you tell it to the softare and it will show that particular word more often, till you see it enough times to remember it.

      This makes vocabulary review much faster and easier. And learning 1000 words in a year becomes fairly easy.

      In my opinion, the best SRS is Anki, which is free for Windows and Android (iPhone app costs around 20 USD, if I remember well)

      If you are interested on the topic, on Saporedicina dot com I wrote several articles on SRS

    • markchina27
      November 25, 2014 @ 12:51 am

      I have to agree about the SRS, anki and pleco are brilliant, or skritter for writing (but at a cost). I use pleco a lot, show the definitions and pinyin only, then try to draw the characters from memory, soon you find you can recognize characters a lot easier and can write as well.

      There’s a point though were I think remembering the characters without writing them gets too difficult, writing helps a lot when they stop looking like this 上 and start looking like this 廉. hope this helps

      • Furio
        November 25, 2014 @ 12:59 am

        Agree,

        the best way to remember complex characters is to write them + use mnemonics. I’m also a fun of Skritter

  4. Monthly Digest of Chinese Learning – November 2014
    November 29, 2014 @ 6:17 pm

    […] How to Turn Studying Chinese into a Habit […]

  5. cystal
    May 25, 2017 @ 10:52 am

    Very helpful information, thanks for sharing these, please keep posting, by the way, I want to share with you why learning mandarin tones is so important! http://blog.international-lan.com/learning-mandarin-tones-important/