For those of you who are full time studying (or indeed anyone else!), what's your study routine?

At the moment I don't really have one, and think I could be a lot more productive if I did.

Cheers!

Ha ha ha ha ha. Here is my "routine":

1. Get very excited and practice a lot over a couple of weeks, being very disciplined, studying multiple times a day, keeping the number of items to review down to zero

2. Go on a trip or get distracted by something and miss a day or two, then come back and find a huge backlog

3. Either put off dealing with the backlog for several days, in which case it just gets bigger and bigger, or bite the bullet and spend a couple of days in a frenzy bringing it down

The main lesson I've drawn is that you really need to practice pretty much every day, and if you can split up your time into multiple sessions per day you will be more relaxed and make progress more quickly. If you miss a day or two you need to come back ready to work and really make an effort to catch up, because you'll fall further and further behind if you procrastinate.

Another thing I didn't fully appreciate when I started was that Skritter has to be part of an integrated Chinese study plan; you can't just learn characters and their definitions, you have to also learn phrases with something like Anki, practice those phrases with native Chinese speakers, read Chinese texts that use those phrases, etc.

James

I'm just about to go on a monthlong trip to various parts of the US, during which time I won't have as much internet access. Today I changed my add word frequency from very high to very low, and am going to try to overpractice before I go. Hopefully that should keep my backlog from being so huge when I come back that I feel overwhelmed.

Hehe

Had to laugh somewhat when I read about your routine, James....it sounded just all too familiar.

I too occasionally will get really excited and practice more than average and then for one reason or another I am forced to have a break. After that break I come back to a big studying queue and avoid studying a bit until I find a big motivation push, which doesn't take long, from somewhere (not seldom I get annoyed with other 外国人 who speak Chinese a lot better than me and I get a bit competitive....I know it's a silly motivation but there you go:).

I try to study every day for a similar amount of time because otherwise I just build up huge queues and I have the feeling I'm not making any progress. Recently it's been roughly 30 (Skritter) minutes a day.
I also study all the new upper intermediate chinesepod lessons when they come out including a few sessions with the cram list (several words there are not high priority for me to learn so I don't add them to my normal queue but writing them a few times helps with the learning of the dialogue).

If there are certain characters eluding me all the time, I make a point in writing some sentences using them.

David

I think it's necessary to do a minimum each day. Just the way memory works. I've even read of chinese nationals who emigrated to the US and stopped writing to their friends because they 'forgot how to write'.

One of the few practical things I learnt in my studies from a psychological point of view is that if you want to set a goal, it should be concrete and specific (don't just say: I will study more, but rather: I will study everyday for 20 minutes after I come back from my coffee break).

@ Whootie

My wife is Chinese and occasionally has exactly that problem...she's writing something down and all of a sudden for the life of her can't remember how to write it....maybe I should let her start using Skritter ;)

1. I try to study regularly
2. Learning Chinese is:
(a)Learning sentences and vocab (I use chinesepod for this
(b)Reading practice (at my level = reading children stories en primary school textbooks)
(c)Pronounciation exercise (reading stuff aloud to a Chinese friend over Skype)
(d)listening practice (using chinesepod lessons mostly)
(e)character memorization with skritter
(f)dictation (listening to chinesepod sentences and writing these down)

I try to do a bit of all of this. Skritter is taking up about 1/3 of my study time

Marc

I agree with Whootie about the importance of at least practicing everyday even if it is only 10 minutes of review. I think it closely follows the brass players saying:

"Skip a day of practice and you'll be fine. Skip two days of practice and it'll take a couple days to recover. Skip three days of practice and it'll take a week or so to recover."

Yeah, every day is key. Thankfully living in China makes reading practice every day (in small doses) very easy as I can read signs while walking down the street. I find that for reading practice, when I study Chinese characters in Skritter, if I have just re-read them (by reviewing textbooks where I first learned them) I get them much more quickly, and the opposite is also true.

I had not done much reading in the past month or so and when I was studying for my exam (reading a passage randomly selected from my textbook) I read and re-read the lesson text making sure that I was getting the tones and pronunciation 100% correct (my tutor helped). I found that after that studying, I can read Hanzi more quickly as that intense reading review really helped (Skritter gave me the knowledge of what character was what but reading it helped me make sense of the usage in my brain).

Since my exam I've been trying to spend some time every day reading (textbooks are good as they review the characters you know and they get through a lot of them - at least mine do).

I've also been doing more TV show watching and talking to people in Chinese - it's still painful but no pain no gain right?

I have just started with Skritter, but it is certainly going to be part of my daily routine from now on. It fits into a gap in my general study very nicely.

My routine:

1) JapanesePod101.com for listening practice, vocab/grammar (although this is becoming less useful lately as I have absorbed most of the higher level stuff they have to offer)
2) Smart.fm for vocab/listening/speaking practice. It's really vocab centric, but because it gives words in sentences, which are combined with sound files, you get listening, and if you repeat the sentences you have good speaking practice also.
3) Lang-8.com for writing practice
4) If time permits, I might work through a textbook or read something with a dictionary, and feed the extra vocab into anki.
5) conversations with a native (exchange students from my local uni generally)

There is a lot there, a few hours a day at least, but this year I've limited myself mostly to just Japanese plus tutoring to pay the bills, so I'm hoping for big results.