I am curious how much time people manage to put into study time before becoming ineffective.

I seem to be able to average 1-1.5 hours per day (in 2 or 3 blocks). It feels like when I push over it becomes ineffective. I am tempted to try an experiement of increasing it to 3 hours per day.

Has anyone else got anything helpful to say or share in terms of upping your learning curve?

Only do what you need to. That is add what you need to complete your learning tasks for the day. If I go over by adding random stuff, I generally go above where I naturally plateau out and it'll come back and bite me a few days later.

So the max I'd want to add in a day is 130 things. Works out about 1.30-2 hours depending how focused I've been.

I am self studying so I have no set amount of tasks short of what I set myself.

Hence my goal is to learn as many words an characters as I possibly can as quick as I can to get myself to the point where I can participate in basic conversation.
Currently, I am experimenting with creating word sets using Taiwanese pop songs which I enjoy listening to.

What I am primarily curious about is why I have some sort of 60-90 minute mental efficiency barrier.
- To put it crudely Is this barrier psychological or biological
- What are other peoples barriers/limits
- Can I increase the barrier with practice.

I am not sure of my word learning rate but my character learning rate averages at 7 characters per day, which if I project out to when I move to taiwan next year is not going to be enough.

I self study too, but some vague kind of structure or objective per day does help.

As for a barrier, if you haven't got a set objective (x characters/things added) it'll be more of a drag. Also, set a max time limit for each study period. Focus hard in this, and then relax. Mine's 25minutes. And do them throughout the day, if you can. Stop once it's done, and do some other studying if you must.

There are loads of ways to learn well. Here's one. If you're wanting to learn a lot of characters quickly use the heisig list. You wont learn new words, but if it is really a basic level of conversation you are aiming for at the moment, focus on that in your other lessons. By the time you really need to start expanding your vocabulary it'll be a lot easier as you'll already know the base characters. Doing this, you can learn a lot more than 7 characters a day, and when you come to adding words, a lot more than 7 words a day.

Some people prefer to add characters/words at the same time. Whatever works really. I guess the thing is you need to set yourself some objectives...

I have found that you can up your endurance, for lack of a better term, over time. When I started learning, I could barely learn five words a night. Now I am up to 30. As your brain becomes better wired for characters, you find yourself breaking them down more and more efficiently. Once that really kicks in, it becomes a lot easier on you.

As for your character learning rate not being enough, what exactly are you shooting for? You say you want to participate in basic conversation, but that is a spoken Chinese aspect and not a written one. I was here studying full time for nearly 3 months pushing myself 8 or more hours a day before I could do that. What goal did you set for yourself and what is your timetable?

I agree with west316, learning to write is a different skill from learning to listen and speak. If your goal is to be able to have conversations you could be practicing conversation *now* (with a tutor, on Skype, whatever).

There have been many times when I heard something in conversation I didn't understand, asked the person to write it down, and realized that I'd already learned the character from Skritter, but didn't understand how to use it in context.

As for how much time per day, there probably is a point of diminishing returns. I like to vary my study diet to keep myself sane: some Skritter, some Anki, some conversation practice, etc.

James

Also, 7 characters per day is not bad at all. If you keep it up for a year, you will be able to write a whopping 2500 characters!

My ultimate goal (which I know is high), is that by the start of next year, to be able to
1) write basic information (such as open bank accounts fill out forms and so on),
2) read children's books, and
3) carry out rudimentary conversations about shallow topics.

I figure once I can read childrens books I should be able to self study my way up to adult level by reading books and interesting comics such as TinTin instead of boring university material.

(PS: I also try to break up my study into 20-30 minute blocks, anything more than that at the moments seems annoyingly inefficient)

Oh, I am at 600 characters in skritter, I am at the point where I can often read most of the characters in a sentence of a book or in the subtitles of the movie EXCEPT the important key words (:

Frustrating, isn't it! Also learning characters, by themselves, isn't terribly useful since Mandarin is highly disyllabic. Learning *words* is far more important than characters.

I think to be successful in Chinese (or any language for that matter) it's important not to put all your eggs in one basket, metaphorically speaking. What I mean is that Skritter alone is unlikely to help you reach all the goals listed.

Start listening to lots of Chinese, maybe get your hands on a graded reader if textbook material isn't your thing. Consider getting a Skype tutor etc. Just some suggestions.

Though to be honest, my Chinese is kinda crap at the moment so take all of the above with more than a pinch of salt. :-)

I study using all sorts of other methods, the thing is skritter has been the most revolutionary in terms of progress.

I think the past two months of skritter has resulted in progress roughly equivalent in progress to the full year of study before skritter.

@xkfowboa: Why do you think that is? Is it because of the SRS technique? Had you used an SRS system before?

James

When I first went to China I got a couple of kid's books to study. I found them pretty hard-going. I've studied a lot since then. When you mentioned you were aiming for kid's books, I picked them up again to have another look. They're still hard going.

Here's some good vocab from them I didn't know:

鼯鼠 - flying squirrel
皮袄 - fur-lined jacket
蚯蚓 - earthworm
树脂 - resin
绿苔 - green moss
喀嚓 - sound of snapping
蟾蜍 - toad
蛞蝓 - slug

A few of those aren't even in Skritter, so even if you learnt all of Skritter, you still wouldn't be able to read this rather brightly coloured, pinyin adorned book (8 pages with about 20 characters per page). Even if you learn all of these, I guess you might not be able to open a bank account :P

When I was trying to learn quickly, I put as much time into Skritter as I could, without thinking too much about neat blocks and putting the time in regularly. This may not be the most efficient way to learn, but if you put in lots of hours, that graph will definitely go up. Work out what number of characters you want by the end of the year (my answer's always 3000 :), and you'll soon be able to figure out how many hours you need to put in a day as you get a steady trend going towards your goal. No reason you shouldn't be able to do several hours a day of Skritter in my opinion. Don't worry about whether you're learning efficiently, just do it. The numbers will go up, I'm sure.

Conversation and reading is important too, but extra vocab will do wonders for both of those, so I wouldn't be shy about making Skritter a pillar of your Mandarin strategy. It'll also probably be easier to get practice when you're actually in Taiwan.

Hmm. Out of interest, why 3000?

And also, might I ask - how many do you know? Just curious in terms of characters relating to ability...

On the topic of random vocab, I was disappointed to find that Skritter doesn't have the character 鬣 in 鬣蜥 and 鬣狗. It looked fun to write, in a masochistic way. I do tend to add random things (I shouldn't, not at this stage), but sadly out of the ones above I only have toad. Actually, just checked the characters. I was mistaken, I have a completely different toad added (蛤蟆). *sigh*

Ok. I like a person with ambition. More importantly than having ambition is the fact that you have the will to go for it. I like that even more. However, please be warned, beyond basic books, reading doesn't improve your speaking that much. There are better ways to improve your speaking. Chinese isn't like English. In English, reading a newspaper can help your spoken English a lot. Reading some Chinese newspaper probably won't. Depending on the goals of your study, it may be of use to read that newspaper, but it won't help your spoken as much. Reading kids books is better, but still please be warned of the drastic difference between real spoken Chinese and written Chinese.

As for opening a bank account, my vocab on my worst day is over 3000 words. If I wanted to open a bank account, I would probably still need to bring my pocket electronic dictionary along and do a lot of speaking around my meaning. (Explain the meaning of a word since I don't know the proper noun or verb for the situation. Also 弄 is my favorite word in Chinese.) If you have that particular criterion, then learning the specific words for your goals will be useful, but sometimes you need to focus on a specialty for a while. For example, I hated the problems I had in restaurants here. I got a couple of take out menus and had my Chinese teachers help me translate them over time.

@Byzanti: I have always been amused by the masochistic word nang4. It has the most strokes of any simplified character I am told. Apparently it is the character advanced students use to mess with their teacher's head.

That 鬣 lie4 character is awesome. You need to zoom about ten times in Chrome before you can see the strokes.

According to Skritter I know around 1600 (from a peak of 1900). I can read or recognise a more than that though, and I suspect I can actually write rather less.

3000 is a pretty arbitrary number. I think it was one of the Skritter team's early milestones for "a lot of characters", and it's bandied about as a good number for being able to read a newspaper. It's also a nice round number and still suitably out of reach for me, despite ambition.

Newspapers: I agree you will not learn 口语 from a newspaper. Reading a Chinese newspaper has definite benefits though. I read a story in a Chinese newspaper about a fairly large robbery that took place in a town near me. It was interesting to see how they did - they placed the town in completely the wrong part of the country in the article, but otherwise OK. A lot of the global news is just translations of wire stories and there's not much benefit to reading that if you just want the news, but if you want the vocabulary to talk about world affairs in Chinese, it's a pretty good start. Things like country names, city names, and so on can't be guessed too easily when they come up in conversation one day. For news about China, Chinese newspapers are unsurprisingly much more detailed than you will get from Western sources, and my experience is that I know little enough about China that I can't help but learn a lot of fairly basic material about the country and the language when I work my way through some news articles.

Chinese forums are better for spoken style Chinese. TV , films and podcasts I find not as convenient as just reading, so I use them less. As my vocabulary goes up reading subtitles and figuring out how to watch Chinese TV shows becomes easier though, so I'll do more of that.

I've taken a lot of one-to-one classes, and one thing I've found is that not having a piece of vocab really slows things down as you have to explain it or look it up. Less of a problem if a teacher has very good English, or your Chinese is at a certain level, but still a problem. That's why I emphasise vocabulary, it just makes everything easier and smoother. Plus I agree with Byzanti that everybody should know how to write toad in at least two ways in Chinese.

I just found a forum comment on chinese-forums.com saying that 3000 characters is the requirement for HSK Advanced, that may have contributed to that being the magic number.

Somehow I remember that 3,000 number as being the magic number needed to be literate enough to read the newspaper, which I unquestioningly took as the appropriate standard.

As for optimal study time, my rule of thumb for one sitting is 20 minutes minimum, 40 minutes maximum.

There is a website somewhere I read a long time ago which says that if you can read 3,000 characters you can read 98% of all characters (based on analysing a wide variety of source material, some of the source material more useful than others).

According to the forumosa.com (taiwanese) forum there is a taiwanese newspaper that uses no more than 3,500 characters. Something to do with 3,500 being the number of characters an average non university educated taiwanese person can read.

ximeng: thanks for that - good reading! As for 3000 characters/HSK advanced - isn't this the one you did?

And also Chris has been kind enough to add 鬣, so we can all go and trouble ourselves on that.

West: Added 齉 and 囊, helped me clarify some of the other usable characters I was having problems with (壤 and others), so much benefit there!

Yup I did HSK advanced so that's what I was working towards. I was hoping to be able to write 3000 characters, but didn't make it by a long shot. I think I might have been able to recognise 3000 characters at a stretch. For the essay though they don't expect you to be able to talk about the time your pet iguana got eaten by a hyena, so I was OK.

You make a joke of it, but I was distraught!

I don't understand how some of you guys have so much time for Skrittering every day. I wish I could devote an hour or more per day. Very hard to make that kind of time on a working day. I also need to make some room for Anki, Rosetta and Pimsleur.

@jimi02 Are you using the old Rosetta or the new one? I have the old one, and frankly it was almost worthless for me. If you have the new one, is it any good?

I hear you jimi02. I try to stay above 10 minutes a day and feel pretty pleased with myself if I hit twenty. I still feel like I make some pretty solid progress at this level, even if it is nothing like some of the addicts on this site!

Right now I am a full time language student, so this is my job. However, back when I was working 50-60 hours a week plus working on my Chinese I usually only managed 2-3 hours a week. I was also completely emotionally exhausted after wards as well.

During full time working I try to get 20 minutes before going to work, and 20 minutes before going to bed.

It is easy to get in all the extra hours if you have some extra motivation, such as knowing you are moving to Taiwan in 7 months and not liking the idea of becoming completely illiterate (:

I did three months last year where I averaged 1.5 to 2 hours a day (on top of a full-time job). A lot of that was at weekends, but I think that the extra hours do help even if the schedule's a bit lumpy. It was hard work, but for a short time with a definite goal (exam!) it's doable.

After the exam I took a long break but now am aiming for 15 minutes a day.

west,

I'm using 3.0. There is a massive difference between this version and the older one. Way better pictures make a big difference, plus a greater array of exercises. It's basically better in every way. They saw the potential of their basic model in 2.0 and overhauled it.