Comments on: Should you focus on learning Chinese words or phrases?

By: Jesse Ford

Jesse Ford — Thu, 02 Jan 2020 19:18:40 +0000

Thanks for mentioning that there are clear benefits for learning words over longer chunks. My wife and I are thinking about putting our son in an afterschool Mandarin Chinese program because we want him to learn a new language that will challenge and help him in his future. I think it’s a good investment to hire a reputable program that will help teach my son Chinese effectively so that he’ll be able to speak it fluently for the rest of his life.

By: Andrew1267

Andrew1267 — Wed, 03 Jan 2018 21:49:13 +0000

Omar Khudari already briefly mentioned the Spoonfed Chinese deck just above. I’d like to second his suggestion and say that this deck is indeed a great source of Chinese sentences with audio. I’m using this deck right now and I’m greatly satisfied with it. The audio recordings are read by many voices, male and female, so it’s a pleasant variety. Some sentences are too easy for me at my current level, so I just excluded them from reviews, but the rest of the sentences are very useful.

Here is a direct link: https://ankiweb.net/shared/info/867291675

By: Omar Khudari (古君健）

Omar Khudari (古君健） — Wed, 29 Nov 2017 17:34:05 +0000

Learning phrases is the most important way to learn words. I feel I don’t fully understand a word until I learn a phrase that uses the word. When you study words in isolation, what are you doing? You are studying a mapping from English to Chinese and Chinese to English. Is that really understanding the word? Mapping to English is not how I want to listen, and mapping from English is not how I want to speak. Secondly, I find that learning phrases is a powerful memory aid. Words are much easier to remember after studying both the word and an example phrase. Whenever I forget a word that I once knew, I add a new example phrase to my Anki deck. Good sources of recorded example phrases are Chinesepod and Spoonfed Chinese.

By: Stewart Lee Beck

Stewart Lee Beck — Mon, 13 Nov 2017 15:55:53 +0000

Good article, Olle!

I would suggest focusing more on words or phrases depending on the situation, since activating certain new words in their colloquial “real world” setting to me seems more difficult than others.

By: 白书行

白书行 — Mon, 23 Oct 2017 20:30:36 +0000

Really nice topic here… I think phrases are key in the beginning but words become more important later on. Words accompanied with example phrases make for nice Anki flash cards ! 🙂

I wrote a post on my blog http://www.talkingmandarin.com about learning Chinese through immersion. I’d love to hear your guys’s thoughts!

Cheers!

By: Olle Linge

Olle Linge — Fri, 13 Oct 2017 06:12:59 +0000

In reply to JN Angermann. This brings up an important point. As I said in the article, once you have basic grammar and word order down, the need to fill that with actual words sky rockets, especially for reading comprehension. However, most words are much easier to learn than most grammar, i.e. in a formal course, it makes sense for teachers to focus on the parts that are hard for the students to do on their own. This naturally includes words too, but learning the basic meaning of many words is considerably easier than understanding how grammar works.

By: JN Angermann

JN Angermann — Fri, 13 Oct 2017 00:02:00 +0000

HSK standard course focuses on structures and grammar and does not have enough vocabulary. It is advisable to learn additional words to use them accordingly.

By: JN Angermann

JN Angermann — Thu, 12 Oct 2017 23:36:24 +0000

You should also learn structures and phrases from the beginning. Then you can substitute words. If you don’t how the Chinese sentences are built and how grammar works, you cannot build any sentences. Words are useless if you do not how to use them in a sentence. If you know some basic structures, you can learn more and more words and use them in this context.

By: Scott

Scott — Thu, 12 Oct 2017 22:30:38 +0000

I always did a mix in my Anki–words, especially if they’re not derived from your real-life Chinese usage are often misleading. You may learn a word and start using it, only to realize it isn’t used in the way you thought. Phrases without words, however, are sometimes harder to recall since the word is remembered embedded within a sentence.

A mixture can definitely help–a word for memory + a phrase or two for context.