thanks for all your advice and all your helpful posts on how to make studying chinese more effective and more efficient. I will make a donation so you keep this excellent work. Also I very much appreciate your effort to engage people in a more social and competitive setting to help them advance in their chinese studies.

I understand your argument about a time goal versus number of new characters learned per day. This hasn’t worked so well for me. I just finished the Course: “Chinese words spoken by frequency 0-1000” by Ben Whately on Memrise a week before Christmas. In two months I had learned all the words and characters (around 950) in just 32 hours net time.

What worked well for me were the following rules:

From a tactical point of view it is important to follow as close as possible the spaced repetition process on memrise.

As it was my top priority I checked into memrise several times during the day and I did this every! day.

Only on week-ends I reduced the frequency.

I first reviewed all words before studying any new ones.

I also build a habit on it.

1) The first thing in the morning I checked how many words was in the queue to review.

2) My rule is that I will at minimum even on a bad day review at least 1 word. Going for a fixed time such as I practice each 30 minutes did not work for me. There were always reasons why I could not do the 30 minutes just now. Once I do the first word I usually continue and say I do the first batch.

I had days when my review would pile up over 300 words to review. In order to avoid procrastination I put my first goal to go below the 300, then I set the next goal to be below 250,then 200,…, when I am below 50, then I go next for below 20, once I am there I usually think I am so close to 0, let’s do the remaining once as well.

3) Learn at least 1 new word, which means I have to complete the review first

4) When I learn a new word I will always try to look at the existing mems (mnemonic cards) created by memrise users

What also helps is to learn the most important radicals – I often use these to anchor the words especially the once I had difficulties with.

For 2015 I have set myself a very ambitious goal. By 31.12.2015 I will read my first Chinese Newspaper. More on my mission if you are interested is here:

Peter