Full deck link: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1CoNSEQ2aRBn03aQRdE8LKt-xZtJrO2RU/view?usp=sharing
Medicine anki learners have AnKing — what’s the equivalent of a fully integrated Chinese mega-deck?
This is my draft of such a mega-deck. It’s very much at an early stage, and I can’t promise to maintain it much. It has rough edges. Feel free to fork and improve it.
Key features:
- Custom-coded notetype to learn how to write characters,
- a new notetype to learn to read/speak/listen to new vocabulary,
- 3100 most common characters,
- 7600 most common words,
- 23000 sentences,
- extensive tagging
NOTETYPES
This deck features two custom-coded notetypes customized towards learning Chinese vocab and writing.
BASIC CHINESE: This notetype is optimized for learning vocabulary.
To learn a language you need to be able to listen, speak, and read. This notetype handles exactly these three.
- Read: Learn to recognize a hanzi, and respond with the correct pinyin and English translation.
- Listen: Listen to multi-word vocab and sentences, and judge yourself on whether you understood them.
- Speak: This is a special one. The front side asks you to translate a sentence or word from English to Chinese and speak it out loud. The same way you need to do in your head when you actually talk Chinese. Of course, you might translate a sentence or word slightly differently than the card's backside suggests.
Chinese has many ways to say a single thing. You’ll need to fairly judge yourself whether your version was good enough (and correct). If you feel like you can’t judge yourself fairly yet because you’re unsure about grammar & co, I suggest suspending all these cards at a beginner level.
BASIC CHINESE CHARACTERS
This notetype is optimized for learning single characters. It features an input card, that can teach you to handwrite characters, including stroke order.
Make the most of this notetype: you need a phone or tablet (AnkiDroid or AnkiMobile). On your mobile device’s keyboard settings, you need to set up a “Chinese Handwriting” keyboard. On Android I recommend Gboard, on Apple I recommend the standard handwriting keyboard. I think there’s also a way to setup handwriting on Windows, but I haven’t tried.
My favorite setup is a small iPad and Apple Pen, though a Samsung phone with just using your fingers or a phone pen has also been working well. These are pressure-sensitive devices, so you can learn to actually make pretty characters instead of uniform ball-pen scribble. If you want to review on desktop, when seeing these cards you can either practice the pinyin input instead, using a pinyin keyboard on your device. Or you only study these on a mobile device with finger or pen input — it’s up to you! Tips for figuring this out for your device setup.
- Windows: https://felixwong.com/2015/11/how-to-write-in-chinese-in-windows-10/
- iOS: https://www.fluentinmandarin.com/content/chinese-characters-handwriting-recognition-iphone-ipad/
- Android: https://support.google.com/gboard/answer/9108773?hl=en&co=GENIE.Platform%3DAndroid
You need to fairly judge how well you drew a character in comparison to the correct stroke order shown on the back side of the card.
I think writing characters is crucial to learning Chinese and makes remembering and understanding characters so much easier. But if you insist on skipping learning to write, you can suspend all of the writing cards.
CONTENT
In the spirit of creating an integrated deck for the community, this deck absorbed many of the best publicly available decks out there. I owe much to the creators of the many other Chinese decks in the community. 多谢! If you’re the creator of one of these and don’t want to have it merged with Ultimate Chinese, please let me know and I’ll take it out.
Decks that are integrated in Ultimate Chinese:
- Domino Chinese {LINK}
- HSK
- Xie Hanzi
- 3000 Hanzi
- 258 Chengyu
- Neri’s Sentences
- Spoonfed Chinese Sentences
- Domino Chinese Sentences (separated out)
- HSK Sentences (separated out)
Thanks to these, this deck features ca 10000 words and 22000 sentences:
- 3100 most common Chinese characters, indexed by frequency. Some have native speaker recordings, some text-to-speech.
- 7600 most common Chinese vocabulary words and phrases. Some native speaker recordings. Top 5000 are indexed by frequency.
- 1700 sentences from Domino Chinese. (I’m not sure how these were sourced.)
- 2600 sentences from HSK. Native speaker recordings!
- 8000 sentences from Spoonfed. Native speaker recordings!
- 11000 sentences straight from Chinese native movies and shows, in the hope of minimizing the number of “weird and unnatural” sentences you’re exposed to. Keep in mind, I haven’t created these. There might be still some sentences that would sound weird to native speakers.
- 250 Chengyu. Chengyu are 4-character idioms that have a rich cultural background, often stemming from stories or ancient literature. These are the cherry on top. 锦上添花
Other features
- Night mode with a blue-light filter
- Aesthetically more pleasing cards
- At least text-to-speech audio, but often native-speaker audio
- Extensive tagging by HSK and Domino levels
- Much of the vocabulary has the tones color-coded. You can turn that off by deleting the “Color” field.
Issues
- Some of the audio sucks, mainly some text-to-speech. Especially the third tones are hard to distinguish from the fourth tones. Keep this in mind! I may or may not fix it in the future.
- Occasionally, some vocabulary might be weird-sounding to natives. I sourced little of the content, so I do not have much control over this.
HOW TO USE (!)
- Use the Ultimate Characters deck on mobile. Figure out how to setup a “Handwriting Chinese” keyboard on your device. See the guide above.
- Suspend everything by default. Then, work through the decks based on word frequency or HSK level. Or work through them based on your class/tutor. Have some guiding structure. For example, I have a class that works through the Integrated Chinese book series.
- Whenever you learn a new word in class, online, in a movie, with a tutor, or wherever: Go into the card browser and search for that word. Now, unsuspend the main card for that word.
Pick 2-3 other words that also use characters from that word.
Pick 3-5 sentences using that word that you can understand at your level. Unspended these words and sentences too.
- Be conservative when unsuspending, be quick to suspend. Unsuspend things you actually are studying right now or that you find interesting. Quickly suspend cards or card types that don’t work for you.
- Grade yourself fairly when you draw characters. You need to set your own rules: Is getting the character roughly right good enough for you? Does it need to be pretty? Does it need to be in the right stroke order?
- Grade yourself fairly when translating from English to Chinese. How flexible do you allow yourself to be with translations? If your sentence/word differed from the front-side of the card, did you get the grammar and meaning right? (If yes, then it’s still a “good” in my opinion.)
PERSONAL TIPS FOR STUDYING CHINESE
- Find habits that work well for you. Anki in the morning, Anki in the evening, tutors, classes, etc. Whatever works. Consistency is key. 持之以恒。
- Use FSRS instead of the old Anki algorithm. Learn about it. Customize FSRS on a past language learning deck you’ve done.
- Do Anki first thing in the morning and also do a session before you sleep. Do Anki in the middle of the day and then take a power nap.
- Don’t just study in your cards. In order to learn how to talk, you need to talk to people. Get a tutor on Preply, talk to in-person friends, join a class, etc.
- Read Scott Young’s Ultralearning. Read Tamu’s experience report. https://www.chinese-forums.com/forums/topic/43939-independent-chinese-study-review/.
- Graded readers.
- Learn how to use Migaku for “sentence-mining”, and watch your favorite shows on Netflix/Youtube in Chinese (dub). Migaku automatically creates flashcards of these sentences in your Anki.
- Use Inkah in your webbrowser.
- Learn the most important vocabulary to navigate your devices, then set their display language to Chinese.
- If you can, travel to Mandarin-speaking regions of the world as soon as you can. Live there for a bit. Get by without English.
This deck and these learning strategies enabled me to learn 1050 words (of which 460 characters) in 70 days. It’s not rote-memorized vocabulary — all of these words are in the context of sentences, which makes it easier to use them and being able to actually participate in and understand basic conversations. For comparison, old HSK3 has ca 600 vocabs, HSK4 has 1200 vocabs. You’re capable of learning faster than you think.
Keep in mind this deck is a very early stage draft, and surely will have rough edges. I hope it’s of use to you. Leave a comment below with feedback!
AnkiWeb’s file sizes are limited, so this deck only contains a fraction of the cards. Link to the full deck: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1CoNSEQ2aRBn03aQRdE8LKt-xZtJrO2RU/view?usp=sharing
祝好
易雷明
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