Level 57 Complete

I am here too now! At the foot of the mountain as the journey has only just begun.. Thanks to Luke & Phil for a cracking course and the massive help, patience and support along the way. I'll delve into Mandarin Companion, Little Fox Chinese and a few selected TV series while we await the release of lvl 58 :-)

Thank you Phil (and Luke) for your recent responses to many of the comments I've been leaving regarding my attempt at a '1,000 characters in a week's attempt. I continue to find your comments most validating and insightful.

I thought I'd just finish up debriefing about how it - the one week experiment - concluded.

As mentioned in an earlier comment of mine, it was looking pretty grim to finish 'initializing' all of the words by the technical end of one week. In fact, it took pretty much somewhere into an 11th day total to get everything straightened out both in my mind and on Anki.

Btw, I see you'd discovered my couple of errors in my example using 4 types of 'qing.' You're quite right of course; I was rushing. I'd noticed them myself shortly after submitting the comment and had written *corrective notes into an edit of the comment. Just as you mentioned in your video response, it was easy to modify the scenes accordingly.

Later; I make a comment about not allowing characters to 'touch' objects or other characters or directly refer to other characters by name or what props they may be using. Previously - based upon the only two 'muddled memories' I'd experienced where I truly could not isolate who belonged to what - allowing this sort of 'trespass' muddled the memory process in a rather distinct sort of way. Abiding by this rule, characters may form as complex of dialogues as they wish with each other so long as they are not directly looking at other characters, directly addressing them, or touching their props or bodies.

Using the technique doesn't require having characters interact from the beginning of developing a Hanzi Movie Method Scene whatsoever. It is - however - definitely an extremely useful way to catalyze a 'starter set' of laterally-connected characters before refining-as-needed on Anki.

As to the 11-day total, there isn't much of significance to say beyond yet another earlier post of mine in which I gave detail; yet 3 fine points comes up.

1) Rolling the process forward with next-day Anki reviews showed:

Day 8 - 400+ characters to review. 10.1 second/character average. @96.% retention.
Day 9 - 500+ characters to review. 11.3 second/character average. @94% retention.
Day 10-600+ characters to review. 15.4 second/character average. @87% retention.

NOTE-1: really not bad, some of that time is just me letting the clock run past the 1-minute Anki default timer while I double-check a prop or get side-tracked.

NOTE-2: Anki can certainly be leveraged in other ways to promote vaarious forms of development. Reviewing words at random is only one sort of usefulness. It takes a bit of learning Anki itself to start separating cards out into 'Character-first' or 'English word first' subdecks. However, it's well worth it, as by this time I have already gone on to further cement the process by reviewing all characters using the 'custom study days in advance' settings to really help ease a sort of 'top-down' set and a 'bottom-up' set as well as an 'everything randomly combined' set: more on that below.

NOTE-3: Although I had listened to a comment made by an 'Anki power user' to the effect of a proven statistically greater retention long-term if one actually extends the default time on one of Anki's review timers from 10 days out to 15 days, there are - in my strong opinion - three excellent benefits from also doing 'speed runs'.

N3a- It boosts the facility for sight-reading and sight-pronouncing characters.

N3b- in conjunction with the fact of exposure to several different fonts, (at least 4) from across the website, ANKI on my PC, and Anki on my Android, there is further challenge of induction to notice little details and make/have denser associative realizations.

N3c1- It enables one to create a habit which will eventually culminate in an average reduction of review time that is perfectly manageable with respect to - say - 1 character/second total accuracy or better: meaning one can fit a relatively large selection to reasonably within a 25 minute time-box. Similarly, I have 4 Mandarin Poster-boards set with the 'first 1,000 characters' and '2nd thousand characters' in both simplified and traditional. You have a photograph of the very same model of poster on one your website pages actually. Eventually, reviewing an entire poster board should easily come in under 25 minutes.

N3c2 {extended}- Less obvious, is that by 'warming up' or 'activating' so many characters in so short a time, such reviews sort of make lateral considerations far more accessible as characters learned a month ago occur to one's mind to compare and contrast with a character learned a week ago, and so on.

There is a classical adage in Psychology and Neurology 101 which says:

"Fire together, wire together; out-of-synch, do not link."

Similarly, seeing strings of similar characters that one already strongly recognizes presented right next to each other in time or space by whatever organizing criterion one chooses, facilitates a very strong understanding of what - in modern psychology - is called 'prototyping.' These prototyping developments require allowing the Hanzi Scenes, which we worked up as necessary scaffolding, to then shift around and/or sluice away as needed as other more sensible bonds of direct in-language develop.

I've returned to a far more considered review now of all the props and radicals as a separate network of complement to my daily review of the 'core characters'. Not wishing to disturb the core, I leave aside learning any Mandarin pronunciation of props and reinforce them in their own separate Deck just so as to have a means of gradually transferring clusters of (admittedly English-heavy) derived meaning from them to the core's developing internally consistent coherence.

Attributing multiple Mandarin-character-relevant English meanings to each prop, (and each core character) is extremely useful in facilitating this 'prototype shuffling', allowing more options for characters and their components and phonemes to find optimized coherence in whatever the brain's gauge of appropriate n-dimensional abstraction or what-not plays around.

I also made separate sub-decks from the Anki vocab decks to isolate all 'English first' flashcards away from 'Mandarin Character first' cards as well as leaving the option of a combined random-review deck. Whereas using both types of cards seems to have been an excellent way of developing a strong initial memory of each character, revealing when one does or does not really remember the character in its entirety and so providing a strong self-correction mechanism, it seems now a good idea to separate out the two approaches and develop an 'English-first network' separate from yet increasingly finely coherently analogous with a likewise increasingly finely coherently analogous 'Hanzi-first network' and allow the challenge-and-confidence reward to exist more predominantly in the speed of retrieval rather than in the totality of recognition.

To borrow one of Luke's terms; I'm 'rejiggering the situation'.

The two networks, so-to-speak, are already pretty conjoined, I'm feeling confident they will continue to meet in the middle as needed. We'll see.

END of Intermediate Vocab Blitz Comments.

..........

Before moving on to any further vocabulary, I'm just going let this core set consolidate for a while and re-evaluate. I may satisfy my curiosity and complete an 'at least one character for every phoneme and tone' possibility, but that's all for now. So many interesting little observations are waiting to be made. For example, the 'biang4' phoneme, (not listed in the brilliant MB phonetic chart) is a bit of an exception in that there is actually an 57-stroke (supposedly most complex character) novelty character called 'biàng' associated with a particular noodle restaurant somewhere in China. 'biàng!' is then typically described as meaning 'Awesome!' as in: 'awesome noodles!' of a sort. I thought the phoneme was unique to that character and restaurant alone. But just yesterday I happened to discover that 'Bu Yi Yang' ( 不一样 bù yīyàng - 'not the same/different') forms a colloquial contraction as....biàng and henceforth means awesome in the right contexts.

In another example, the phoneme 'ce' could have any of the 4 tones associated with it and yet there are only ever 4th-tone characters listed in any dictionary I've yet seen. yet it seems best to consolidate for now and focus on shifting towards reading and shadowing.

Setting these little PBL (Project-based Learning) challenges has been increasingly engaging.

There have been two rather exciting developments in the pronunciation/listening/mental transcription arena, but I'll leave that for now and give myself 2 solid weeks to shift focus onto listen-sentence-passage-shadow practice leading up to my HSK 4 attempt...so you might not be hearing from me for a little while.

As always: thank you!

and cheers.

Phew, made it 😁. Can't believe I made it so far, although at some point through the Intermediate you do start to realise that this is all just the very basics of the overall mountain to climb! But honestly, this course is great and truly the best way to learn characters. Thanks so much for all the material and your personal dedication and the fact that you are always there to support us. It is really appreciated.

Well, I'm done and it's kind of hard to believe. MB's been such a big part of my daily routine for nearly two years. I'm going to miss it. I kind of feel like a baby bird jumping out of the nest and hoping my wings will support me. One thing is for sure, this is the best character learning method out there. Thanks guys.

Wow, mazeltov congrats and 恭喜 to all you fellow intermediate finishers.

I had planned to finish the final 30 characters over the course of the next two weeks, but I woke up today and decided to just rip the plaster off and I can't really believe I've reached this point.

Going to China was never really on my agenda up until a few years ago and even when I was there, learning Mandarin was never something I put much thought into (too hard init).

Then one day, scrolling through Facebook "ah man, bloody ads". But praise the lord for autoplay. A free trial later and now maybe eleven months on, with 1530 characters down, it's all a bit surreal and I'm excited for my future Mandarin journey.

I am now more than happy to have a good lie down until the next course comes out (honestly, no rush lads!).
A huge thank you to you both, what you have created is an achievement you should be really proud of and I think has opened an otherwise quite impenetrable Chinese made door one of those automatic sensor doors (basically you've made the whole thing easy!).
Thank you!