2000 Hours of Chinese Study | Refold, Immersion, Anki, and More

[@paulacres794]

Get a coffee, relax and sit back for the masterpiece that is a Deep Forest - Fukai Mori update

[@deepforest_fukaimori]

This has to be the highest complement I've ever received 😀

[@agungredking9160]

I watched your videos a year ago, when I started learning Chinese. I'm pretty much following a similar approach. Now I have around 5k active Anki cards and about 1k+ hours of immersion (including Anki). At my current level, I can watch modern dramas with Chinese subtitles (of course, I don’t fully understand everything, but I get the main idea of what they’re talking about). I'm also more comfortable watching daily life and travel vlogs now. However, things like news and more specific topics like economics, science, and history are still really, really difficult for me to comprehend. I'm still having trouble with speaking. When I try to talk to natives, they often don’t understand me, and I have to repeat the words multiple times. Sometimes I just give up and switch to speaking English. I guess immersion alone is not enough, and I will need some dedicated practice to improve my speaking ability. I didn’t see you address speaking in the video. Do you just skip speaking altogether?

[@deepforest_fukaimori]

Nice work! It sounds like you're doing great. Regarding speaking, if you find you're often not being understood, perhaps it's a good idea to start a silent period, or at least only say things you're 100% confident you'll nail. Though I also have a theory that when a Chinese person is speaking with someone they don't expect to understand Mandarin, their brain will be geared up to hear English only (or whatever the local language is). I think this is why sometimes a perfectly spoken sentence can still result in a confused look and the person saying "Sorry, what?" I have a handful of one-liners, but I currently don't speak Chinese. It's not that I'm against early output, I just don't feel like I can participate in a conversation with my current level of comprehension. If someone says something in Chinese that I'd like to chime in on, I'll respond in English. Best of luck on your language learning journey!

[@James_zai_dongbei]

Cool video, thanks for sharing! What specifically have you been watching/reading etc?

[@deepforest_fukaimori]

Thank you! Currently I'm watching The Daily Life of The Immortal King Season 4, and reading Wen Ji from DuChinese. I recently rewatched the cdrama Twenties Once Again (2018 version). In general, I've found graded readers from DuChinese and Imagin8 Press useful. Bilibili is a great resource for Manhua/translated Manga.

[@James_zai_dongbei]

@@deepforest_fukaimori cheers mate

[@Matheus-ct1xl]

New videooo! ❤

[@deepforest_fukaimori]

Thanks for clicking, hope you like it! 😀

[@ModestKnowledge]

I much prefer free flow because pausing immersion is annoying to me. Do you find you still made good progress free flowing? Or would you recommend intensive immersion from the start?

[@deepforest_fukaimori]

I think free flow is ideal for getting low hanging fruit and solidifying things you already know. This is very useful at the start because there is an abundance of unknown words/phrases that come up extremely frequently, and there is also theoretical knowledge from building your language foundation that will now crystallize in practice. However, there comes a point where intensive immersion is required to continue making progress at a meaningful pace. I started my own language learning journey by only wanting to do free flow and Anki. This was fine at first, but after a while my progress slowed down to a crawl. It wasn't until I introduced intensive immersion that I began improving at a reasonable pace again. My recommendation is to still start with free flow. After ~300 hours begin dabbling in intensive, and start spending at least 1/3rd of your immersion time on intensive no later than the 500 hour mark of free flow. (Note that I only hold this opinion for dissimilar languages like English and Chinese. I'm unsure if this is true for similar languages like English and Spanish.)

[@ModestKnowledge]

@@deepforest_fukaimori thank you for your response! Blessings!

[@SoccerDude214365]

If you've only done 5,000 cards from a premade deck, I imagine there's a good chance your comprehension is limited by vocabulary. You probably should be close to HSK6 at this point. I would take a look at the vocabulary list for HSK5,6,7 and see where you think you are. If you think you don't know a lot of those words, might be worth really drilling Anki for low-frequency (but still important) words.

[@deepforest_fukaimori]

I think you're right that vocabulary is limiting my comprehension. As I've improved my bottlenecks of automaticity and spoken comprehension without visual aids, it's probably time to switch my focus back to vocabulary. Tomorrow I'll start ramping up my new card count in Anki. Thanks for the advice 😊 (Also just a side note for the record, while I have leveraged premade decks, most of my Anki cards come from sentence mining.)

[@SoccerDude214365]

​@@deepforest_fukaimori A few months ago I tried making a sentence Anki card for basically every new word, chengyu, idiom, or other ambiguity I encounter (or rather those that I don't imagine being totally useless). And at first this was very slow and pain, and I could easily make 200 cards a movie. But my Chinese (and yours probably is too) was also at a level where I can easily learn 100+ cards a day without much strain. I'm really pleased with how much more I understand after. It's probably a similar experience to what you report with the intensive reading.