Great! I actually didn’t finish my goal this time, but that was mostly because of the fact that I couldn’t use my writing tablet for the entire week. I simply won’t kill off a few hundred characters in Skritter with a mouse! I have Anki down to zero, though, so that’s according to plan at least.

I am posting to say I am finished, already at 1300 cards. Slowed down a bit in the last week but still happy.

This was quite a good way to drive progress so think I will set a monthly goal from now on.

Got to 900 already, few days to go. Setting Anki’s default add rate to 30 works pretty well for me – sometimes I get them all done and it moves along rapidly, otherwise i tend to get about as many new ones as I have time for.

Having a good impact on my vocabulary already, very noticeable in conversation and reading that I have more words at my disposal. Have of course had Chinese people tell me my Chinese was good in a non-specific way but they never said I used rich and colorful words. Obviously they are overstating the case though – I still working on a lot of HSK 4 vocab.

I got someone to create flashcards for me which has freed up a lot of time for studying the conversations instead.

At least some of the time I want to review sentences that I’ve selected myself.

I find learning stuff that is slightly below my level is fine with “generic” sentences, this is kind of filling the gap of stuff that’s easy to understand and I kind of know, but I haven’t got around to memorizing properly yet (or it’s useful to see more examples).

With content that is more advanced tends to be more important to be picky – I don’t want to drown in it. I like to choose dialogs/media that I’ve already studied, and add them to Anki as soon as possible.

I like dialogs because it’s a connected topic so you learn 4-5 words which can be used together (e.g. contract, expire, renew, salary, number) which opens a whole topic up for exploration and (importantly) use.

Olle wrote some good ideas on this:
http://www.hackingchinese.com/?p=2958

Hey Tyson, we got rid of our MCD feature during the private beta, and are working on reintegrating it in another -improved- way in the coming weeks.

BTW, do you want to review YOUR sentences or any of your level is fine?

Milestone #1, July 28:
Anki queue down to 2500: Check! Currently at 2342.
Skritter queue down to 600: Check! Currently at 600.

Thanks Thomas – My flashcards are sentences (or longer). I use MCD format (search for AJATT and MCD and real all about it). They look like this:
[…]本上等15分钟就可以了。
Waiting for 15 minutes is usually enough.

My job is to supply the missing character – which is 基. Actually this sentence can also be used for the 本，上，等 etc.. whatever you don’t know. Anki lets you just mark them as clozes, and it will make a card for each one. I also include full sentence audio and pinyin and definitions of key words on the back

I use multiple sources:
1. ChinesePod podcasts (native speaker audio is great). Good for conversations.
2. 3800 useful Chinese sentences from mandarinchineseschool.com. They also have audio. Good for basic daily phrases.
3. About.com and Nciku – good for grabbing examples of words I need, but need to add audio most of the time.
4. Email and stuff I get in my own life – if it’s bilingual I get someone to record the Chinese audio, break it into sentences and use it.
There’s a lot of recording, cut and paste, chopping up mp3 files and so on that I am not super keen to do, which is why I’m happy to pay for the work to get done.

I tried nuli just now. I like the learning interface a lot it’s a good way to go through lists of vocab. I really like the live feed it’s great to read actual posts. My goals for reviewing are different from what Nuli does right now – but I think it’s a very nice interface for reading.

Great! This reminds me that I probably should add some oil. I did pretty well the first week, but haven’t done much this week. Still a few days left, so i should be fine. Keep us posted!

Amazing Tyson!

May I ask what source you want to use to create flashcards? Do you want words, sentences, … ?

You may not need to hire anyone and do it directly through http://nulinu.li and the “Review” feature.