Milestone #1 (April 8th): 250
Milestone #2 (April 30th): 450 (haven’t met!)
Milestone #3 (May 31st): 650
End of challenge (June 30th): 850

I didn’t really study too much before the challenge, just flash cards, which I find easier to memorize.

I have been using Skritter lately too, in the first milestone I said I didn’t find it useful but I got a mouse and it has changed my perspective. I actually think it’s pretty useful now, it’s helping me not only with the writting but with the tones, which is something I always have problems with. Do you think I could get an extension? Mine expired time ago and I have just been reviewing the words that were saved but I’d like to add some new ones.

Thanks!!

You are right about the character confusion, especially for the tones (for excample 蹦(beng4) and 崩(beng1). Now I have to create extra mnemonic just only to help me remembering that.

Also the characters in the list I am learning now are less freqently used thus less seen in my real life context (I’m living in China). So I slightly changed my tactic by not only stricting to the pre-made characters list (3000 most used characters) but modifying it to my own use. Basically I have been collecting the characters from the food menu, sign, or any reading materials of my professional(architecture)that I haven’t learned and putting in the list.

By the way, I have recieved the posters. They look great on the wall and definitely will be useful for my study. Thanks Olle and people for Hanzi WallChart!

Cheers

I’m late to check in for the second mile stone because I was abroad.
My goal for the second mile stone was 50% of the HSK 3 vocabulary on Skritter. I actually did 45.8% which means I’ll have to pick up speed towards the third mile stone, but I really feel happy with my achievements, also because I average around a retention of 87% with an upwards trend.

I’m already looking forward in excitement to the day when I will finally start the HSK 4 vocable list 🙂

Thanks again for the great challenge
大家加油!

Haha, sorry about that, I blame the comment system I use, which is horrible! Good to hear that you’re learning seems to be going well. 🙂

I am a little behind my milestone according to Skritter but feel like I am learning faster than ever.

I have decided to be more proactive with creating mnemonics before I add the character. I think it is cutting my learning time.

Only 80 more to add from hsk 4! Feels good!

PS Olle you are too efficient. I was on the list at 66 and added me again at 96!

That’s a good idea, and as you said, more realistic.

Olle, I have a question for you; if you have time to reply I would greatly appreciate your advice, if not, no worries. I saw below in one of your other replies that you use Skritter solely for writing individual characters and rely on Anki for your other needs. Your method does not seem radical to me, in fact it makes a lot of sense.

I had an interesting conversation with a Chinese friend the other day. I asked about the meaning of a character and he said that it didn’t really mean anything. At first I disagreed with him, (if individual characters have no meaning why do we have character dictionaries?) but the more I thought about it, the more it made sense to me. Although some characters have multiple identities as both bound and free morphemes, the majority of characters are bound morphemes and cannot stand alone. Given that most characters can only serve as bound morphemes, as learners we are stuck in a kind of contextual void. Of course we don’t leave it at that, as you wrote in your other articles, we make a character learning toolkit for ourselves, using mnemonics and a solid understanding of character components to build a scaffolding for our memory. Skritter is ideal for learning characters because the physical act of writing not only helps us write better, it functions as another hook for our memory.

Words on the other hand are a whole ‘nother animal. Although they are free morphemes, their meanings are still highly fluid and only gain solidity in the context of a sentence. Of course mnemonics are also highly helpful in learning words, but learning words in context, in sentences, creates even more conceptual hooks for our memory and does so in ‘the wild’, teaching us about collocations and nuances that would be difficult to impart without the context provided by those sentences. Skritter is less useful for sentences. I know that none of this is new to you, but it was an epiphany for me, and it helped me to organize my thoughts, so thanks for bearing with me.

Anyways, I’m almost to my actual question… 🙂

Given these epiphanies and the inspiration provided by your and Khatzumoto’s blog, I have started using Khatzumoto’s MCD method to learn words ‘in the wild’, in a context-rich environment, and I have decided to do so using Anki and the MCD plugin. I want to eventually stop using Skritter to learn words (inefficient) and only use it for learning characters (efficient and fun). I’m trying to figure out the best way to proceed from here. I am open to the possibility of nuking my Skritter account, but I’m not sure if that’s the best way to go. I read your “Is your flashcard deck too big for your own good?” article, and I am definitely spending too large a portion of my time on SRS study, and not enough time listening, reading, talking, and writing. My question for you is, do you have any suggestions about how to make this transition more smoothly? If I do decide to nuke my account, I think I would follow your tack and make use of your 台湾通用字汇 lists (studying the simplified variants) and perhaps also use Skritter solely for studying writing.

That’s of course okay, just want people to be happy with the prizes. They should contact you shortly about the prize!

I really like Glossika’s products, so I’d love to keep it! ☺️