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Comment by vunderba | Hacker News Reader

I commend the author's discipline - this is a pretty standard approach.

TLDR

- Move as many things as possible in regular life to the target language (software, tv shows, reading, etc) to maintain the language

- There is no substitute for full immersion if you have the opportunity. I learned traditional Chinese in Taiwan while I was an ESL teacher.

- The power of SRS (spaced repetition system) cannot be overstated

I will add my own bit to it. If you like mnemonic systems, Heisig wrote a very good book called "Remembering Traditional Hanzi" where the idea is to use the radicals in the character to construct a visual image to aid in recall. I highly recommend it.

https://uhpress.hawaii.edu/title/remembering-traditional-han...

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> The power of SRS (spaced repetition system) cannot be overstated

Speaking as someone who has used Anki the last 5 years, has built and sold Anki decks and is working on implementing various spaced repetition schedulers as we speak... unfortunately its importance can absolutely be overstated.

Definitely more language learners should be using an SRS, but there are lots of people who take it way too far (I have way too many stories).

Where things go wrong for most people is their understanding of the role of the SRS. The SRS to language learning is what protein shakes are to bodybuilding. But while no serious body builder would try to get ripped by drinking protein shakes and neglecting working out, there are unfortunately tons of language learners doing basically just that with the SRS. To acquire a language you need input! The SRS is just (very) helpful supplement.

Sure - I don't think the article (or myself) are making the case that SRS is all you need - after all - its just flashcards on steroids, and nobody would make the case that flashcards are enough to become fluent in a language.

That's the same type of person who assumes you can become fluent purely through Duolingo.

> there are lots of people who take it way too far

I wrote in another comment that that’s exactly my issue. I can easily spend hours, days, weeks even just tweaking my card templates due to Anki’s extreme customizability. That stems from a (false!) belief that I can somehow find just the right card format that will impress the language in my head in no time. Took me a long time to reign in the impulse to endlessly tweak templates. I remember having days when I felt extremely frustrated after realizing I had spent pretty much my entire study time working on Anki and not exposing myself to the language.

yeah that's a trap I think a lot of people with an engineering mindset fall in to. Reminds me of the people who spend endless hours tweaking their note taking applications.

Believe it or not, after 5 years of Anki, I still have 0 styling on my personal decks. Not even dark mode. Just black text on a white background haha

Do you mean "cannot be overstated"? "Cannot be understated" means you can't talk badly enough about it.

"Cannot be overstated" would mean it's impossible to talk too highly of it.

Updated! Guess I traded a bit of my fluency in English for Chinese. :p

I worked through “Remembering Simplified Hanzi” and my one complaint is that I wish that it were “grouped by frequency” a bit more.

The way that these books work is that the first one is the most common ~1500 characters grouped by radical / component, and then the second one is the next most common ~1500 characters grouped the same way.

The problem is that this means that you have to learn 1500 characters before you know all of the most common 1500. I stopped after 1000 characters and was left not knowing many extremely common characters that hadn’t been introduced yet.

I think that a better organization would have been 500, 1000, 1500 instead of 1500, 1500.

Other than that, great books that I also recommend.

Tuttle "Learning Chinese Characters" by Matthews and Matthews is organized in the way you mention. I find it highly recommendable, although I can't compare to Heisig's book because I don't have that one.

It only has 800 characters, though. But they are the most common.

The first book actually only contains the most common (by their methodology) 1000 characters:

> "The 55 lessons from Book 1 cover the 1,000 most commonly used characters in the Chinese writing system, plus another 500 included either because they are needed to preserve the logical ordering of the material or because they are especially easy to learn at this early stage."

Those 500 are still from the most common ~3000 total that comprise both books at least, but it means that you really have to learn 1500 characters before you're guaranteed to know the most common 1000. And learn all 3000 before you're guaranteed to know the most common 1500.

I've been going so slowly it's taken me years to reach my current point of character #2170, but eventually I'll get there, even if I've already been reading sentences with characters that I haven't gotten to yet for a while now.

"The power of SRS (spaced repetition system) cannot be overstated"

For an alternative take, there is at least some evidence that SRS is entirely unnecessary and can even hinder language learning. I know it at least is not required by first language speakers, and have also seen many examples of fluent second and third language speakers who never use SRS, or any other kind of "practiced" language acquisition such as learning vocabulary, grammar, etc.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Input_hypothesis

For instance here's a PhD thesis of someone who learned French to fluency with only watching TV and (later) reading books:

https://espace.library.uq.edu.au/view/UQ:9b49365

One of the points in Input Hypothesis is something I'm sure everybody would agree with:

This states that learners progress in their knowledge of the language when they comprehend language input that is slightly more advanced than their current level. Krashen called this level of input "i+1", where "i" is the learner's interlanguage and "+1" is the next stage of language acquisition.

Informally I've always called it "walking the knife's edge" - you have to be always on the slight edge of feeling uncomfortable to realize meaningful gains. I mean it makes logical sense. The brain is ALWAYS trying to optimize away through chunking/patterns/etc. so you have to be constantly challenging it.

It's the reason why there's a huge skill difference between a driver at one month vs 1 year, but a far less difference between a driver at one year vs ten years.

> For an alternative take, there is at least some evidence that SRS is entirely unnecessary and can even hinder language learning.

I do not believe that the above is an alternative take. Most people who do SRS pair it with tons of comprehensible input. Also, a lot of takedowns on SRS tend to actually be takedowns on memorizing 1:1 translations of words at all which is all they assume people do with SRS. I've never done those, because I think word lists are bad and 1:1 translations from L1->L2 are bad because they are always wrong (languages are different, not substitution ciphers.) I almost only deal in complete sentences in SRS, and clozes.

There's also a piece of advice given by David Parlett in an old book about learning languages straight from possibly incomplete printed grammars and native or anthropological recordings: "learn the hard stuff first." There are some things about languages that are central, complex, and should just be learned by rote. Romance conjugations are some of those things. Using SRS to learn how to conjugate reflexively and automatically in Spanish (after probably 50K card reviews) was the best thing I could have done to open up a world of comprehensible input.

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