Have any questions about the course? Want to share an interesting "movie scene?" How about an Actor, Set or Prop? Just leave a comment below the lesson in question and we'll talk about it in our weekly podcast!
Relator - Expressing Distance with 离
We make frequent blog updates that will make you SUPER motivated as you keep climbing the "acquisition mountain." Check it out and subscribe!
Soren Korsbaek
Hi,
Firstly just a Traverse one:
Since starting to add sentences on Traverse from the Advanced course for some reason I can't see the actual sentences when choosing whether to add them, but when I do add them, they show up as normal during my reviews. Flagging here instead of reaching out to Traverse directly as not sure if there is something different on the MB side of things in comparison to the earlier sentences. Could definitely also just be a form of niche-issue my end as I have a fairly long history of Anki and Traverse struggles!
Secondly:
Since starting to add the sentences from the Upper Intermediate course, I think my success rate of understanding sentences is maybe around the 20% mark which obviously is far from great. This is not significantly greater when encountering the sentences the second time unless I've looked it up or likewise. As a result I try to think of them as light immersion and/or vocab flashcards (i.e. I will fail the more interesting vocab just to see it again and hit easy for the vocab that doesn't seem as relevant for me (or remove the sentence completely of course).
I wanted to make an additional point using the below sentence as an example:
"新来的县长'省事'效率特别高。
用法 2 - v. to handle administrative work
xǐngshì"
---
Given the irregular pronunciation, it's easy to be cut off guard and start doubting whether you memorise the right character or if you're going wrong somewhere. In my view it would be super helpful to have the irregular ones flagged/marked in some way but even more useful having the keywords for the characters the vocab learned relate to listed on the flashcard too. In this way, it's easy to review characters simultaneously and you don't need to spend time looking up whether you've got the character wrong, etc.
I would find the sentences more convenient and useful with these sort of relatively minor improvements that would save a lot of time in the long run.
(It's no secret I'm still very keen on translations for the sentences still as this would aid remembering a lot of vocab I currently wouldn't spend time looking up as I can't remember all the different compound words but I think that's a bigger and more controversial change than the above ones)
To glory and victory! :)
Mandarin Blueprint
Hey Soren,
I emailed Dominic and copied you about the first point, we'll hopefully get that sorted out soon.
Regarding your second point, I've made it so that the "personal notes" field now shows up on the front of the card in Traverse. We already put the Pinyin there, so if it's an irregular pronunciation you'll be able to see it there without seeing the definition until you're on the back of the card. Since we already explicitly write secondary and tertiary syllables in the course platform, you'll now have it in both places.