Glad to hear you find Hacking Chinese useful! Reading comments like yours is what motivates me to keep writing articles and recording podcast episodes. As for your experience with flashcards, one of the challenges writing this series was to adress people with completely different starting points. Some people have never used flashcard, and they need to try them out because they can be highly effective; some people have used flashcards, and like you describe your earlier experience, might have gone a little bit overboard with quantity; some people have used flashcards, but think they are utterly useless as they aren’t meaning-focused or comprehensible input.

The idea was to take the reader and listener through this journey, exploring various ways of looking at flashcards. As is usually the case, the truth isn’t black or white, so saying that flashcards are great or that flashcards are terrible won’t cut it. For whatever it’s worth, I think your current approach makes sense. I would also limit flashcard use, and depending on how much you study overall, something like 15 minutes a day seems fine! When it comes to mnemonics, I only use them when I really need to and find methods that encourage you to use them for everything very tedious. I wrote more about that here if you haven’t seen it already.

Also, I love your name! 😉

Thanks for sharing! I think your experiment is going to go well. In general, reading and listening are much more important than doing isolated flashcards. I will talk more about this in the next article in this series, and also in the final one, but using flashcards is a bit like going to the gym: it’s great for exercising specific muscles, but if you want to get good at playing basketball, you have to play basketball. Going to the gym helps, but it shouldn’t be confused with playing the game. Similarly, flashcards are great, especially for getting started, but once you’ve reached a level where simply reading and listening more is a viable option, there’s little need to use flashcards for everything. That being said, many professional athletes of course still go to the gym, and I think there’s certainly room for flashcards in both your learning routine and mine, but that role is not to make sure you learn and remember every word you come across. Good luck! 🙂

I have been using flashcards (Anki, self made deck) to learn for around 10 years, just from the beginning. I had more than 10 years strike. Reached HSK3-4 after few years, then stuck on the plateau for years… For many years it was my only way of learning Chinese. I added every word I stumbled upon. For years it worked well but for the last few years it grow over me. I tried many things: purging words, mnemonics, etymology, …. I had many due cards, and tons of suspended cards because I failed them so many times. It become a pain. Then I hated them more and more. Around two-three years ago they become my secondary way to learn (just didn’t wanted to give up on it since it was part of me) and started to focus on listening, mainly videos on YouTube and podcasts. Finally again had some sense of accomplishment. Also I started to watch Steve Kaufmann, Stephen Krashen and Poliglot videos more and more. Then this summer I changed my learning all around. I finally have given up on flashcards, and started a challenge for myself to read 1 million words (not characters) in one year. I subscribed to LingQ (it had many build in materials and great stats and word word knowledge system) and since than I read around 2-2.5 hours a day (sometimes it feels a bit too much and I started to neglect my other hobbies, but I was fed up not going anywhere with Chinese). My stats (I’m a geek) are looking great so far. I have my private diary about this experiment, to be able to analyze later. I concluded that my flashcards lacked one important factor: ordering by importance/frequency but reading gives this to me. (Who needs 农贸市场 after all?!??;)) Besides reading I still watch videos a lot, my habit is to alter my two target languages: on odd numbered days I just watch/listen to Chinese on even numbers just English. I also do occasionally HSK tests to have some external measurement of my progress. Also I have some weird feelings when I chat with my Chinese teachers online that something (passive vocabulary) is growing inside me, because many times I feel that I know the word that I want to say but can’t find it. It’s a weird but great feeling. So wish me luck for my experiment.

Cheers,
电猫