My current level of Chinese is quite good, I have no problems in daily life, can read Classical Chinese/literature/news articles without too much difficulty, and although my writing skills are lacking, I have little use for improving it currently. While I search for a job, I’ve been doing reading (just finished 桂花雨 by 琦君, halfway through 秧歌 by 張愛玲), and have been writing down words I don’t recognize to look up later. After I’m done reading, I put the character, word, or chengyu into Mnemosyne, a handy flashcard program, and review them. This works pretty well, but it’s limited to what I read. If I’m too lazy, I don’t bother writing words down, making my vocab list far from complete.
I’d like a large list of single character definitions, perhaps aimed at native speakers. I’m sure there’s something out there…I wouldn’t mind using a high school college entrance exam review, but I don’t know where to start looking. The larger the list, the better. Either that, or I’m going to just go through my electronic dictionary and enter every character I don’t know. To save a bit of time, I’d prefer to find a pre-made list, possibly compatible with Mnemosyne. Any suggestions?
There’s Taiwan grade 9 downloadable for Anki. Mnemosyne is compatible with Anki, don’t know about the other way round. There’s also a file for Grades 1-8 which is about 3000 characters, and Grade 9 is an additional 2900-ish. I’m blasting through that right now.
Sorry, that’s not helpful if they aren’t compatible, but I don’t use Mnemosyne.
[quote=“Buttercup”]There’s Taiwan grade 9 downloadable for Anki. Mnemosyne is compatible with Anki, don’t know about the other way round. There’s also a file for Grades 1-8 which is about 3000 characters, and Grade 9 is an additional 2900-ish. I’m blasting through that right now.
Sorry, that’s not helpful if they aren’t compatible, but I don’t use Mnemosyne.[/quote]
Thanks, I may give Anki a try and see how it measures up to Mnemosyne. There are a handful of features with Mnemosyne that I find a bit irritating.
[quote=“Edaren”][quote=“Buttercup”]There’s Taiwan grade 9 downloadable for Anki. Mnemosyne is compatible with Anki, don’t know about the other way round. There’s also a file for Grades 1-8 which is about 3000 characters, and Grade 9 is an additional 2900-ish. I’m blasting through that right now.
Sorry, that’s not helpful if they aren’t compatible, but I don’t use Mnemosyne.[/quote]
Thanks, I may give Anki a try and see how it measures up to Mnemosyne. There are a handful of features with Mnemosyne that I find a bit irritating.[/quote]
Well, I started using it a few weeks ago because I didn’t really study any Chinese since I left Taiwan more than a year ago. Starting to forget a lot. I also want to take HSK for various reasons and I was getting frustrated with my abilities with simplified characters, so I thought I’d give this SRS lark a go. it’s too early to say whether it’s ‘working’, but I’m happy with Anki so far. It seems to work really well and it’s really simple to both download and create your own decks. I haven’t tried to import anything, because I’m happy to just use the character decks already up there; I don’t have anything personalised.
I’m just wondering whether there’s any way to back up my data, after a nasty OJ incident the other day. I’d hate to go back to the start with the 20 000 character simplified, frequency list I’m 3000 into…
[quote=“Buttercup”][quote=“Edaren”][quote=“Buttercup”]There’s Taiwan grade 9 downloadable for Anki. Mnemosyne is compatible with Anki, don’t know about the other way round. There’s also a file for Grades 1-8 which is about 3000 characters, and Grade 9 is an additional 2900-ish. I’m blasting through that right now.
Sorry, that’s not helpful if they aren’t compatible, but I don’t use Mnemosyne.[/quote]
Thanks, I may give Anki a try and see how it measures up to Mnemosyne. There are a handful of features with Mnemosyne that I find a bit irritating.[/quote]
Well, I started using it a few weeks ago because I didn’t really study any Chinese since I left Taiwan more than a year ago. Starting to forget a lot. I also want to take HSK for various reasons and I was getting frustrated with my abilities with simplified characters, so I thought I’d give this SRS lark a go. it’s too early to say whether it’s ‘working’, but I’m happy with Anki so far. It seems to work really well and it’s really simple to both download and create your own decks. I haven’t tried to import anything, because I’m happy to just use the character decks already up there; I don’t have anything personalised.
I’m just wondering whether there’s any way to back up my data, after a nasty OJ incident the other day. I’d hate to go back to the start with the 20 000 character simplified, frequency list I’m 3000 into…
Good luck with it, anyway.[/quote]
Thanks again. Anki is a lot better than Mnemosyne, and the level 9 deck is perfect for my level. The only issue is that the definitions are in English, and while looking up one of the characters (軋) in my Chinese dictionary, I found that the pinyin was incorrect and the English definition was also wrong. I may make it a project to convert all of the English definitions to Chinese ones and repost it.
The main problem with it is that some characters have so many definitions, it just gets pointless to have such a lot of info, or the opposite in that there is too little info. Pitfall of the single character approach. It really does improve your reading, though.
Any non-pro thing of that size is going to need some tweaking, to a certain extent, though.
[quote=“Buttercup”]The main problem with it is that some characters have so many definitions, it just gets pointless to have such a lot of info, or the opposite in that there is too little info. Pitfall of the single character approach. It really does improve your reading, though.
Any non-pro thing of that size is going to need some tweaking, to a certain extent, though.[/quote]
I always err on the side of too much info. I’m a big fan of classical Chinese, and only knowing one usage of a character can be very limiting. I’ve tried editing the deck, but there is no plugin for pinyin tonal marks. In Mnemosyne there’s a plugin I downloaded that converts the number after the word to a tone mark. Hopefully I’ll be able to figure it out soon enough.
Don’t know, I just input tonemarks as I’m writing.
Not really ever touched classical Chinese, although I got given a parallel edition of Tang poetry. Lots of moony stuff about looking at trees and lakes and whatnot while far from home.
