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I have been using SRS to learn Mandarin Chinese for the last 2 years now and I can also verify it is extremely effective when used correctly, and when understanding its' advantages and limitations.

I think sentences are also a much better way to learn than learning single vocabulary words, because they show the usage of the word in context. This is very important for speaking naturally and idiomatically.

Once you get beyond a beginner level, choosing a direction of study can be a little difficult. My technique is to find sentences or phrases from conversations I have with people, books/articles I read, and from movies/television shows - and then input it into the SRS. Preferably, each sentence has 1 new novel phrase or vocabulary word. Although this can be time consuming it gives a huge benefit. Let me give an example:

  Question side: “問題是。。。你不覺得這樣，很。。。虛偽嗎？"

  Answer side: 虛偽 (xūwěi - hypocritical, artificial)

So, in this case the second last two characters made up the word that I was unfamiliar with, so I put that on the answer side. The huge benefit is that I found this sentence in a book I am reading - so every time it comes up in the SRS, I not only recall the sentence, I recall the context of the story (in this case a dialogue between two characters), and this has a double reinforcing effect. In the same way, that if a TV or movie character says a sentence over and over again in a video, it will cause you to remember the scene of the sentence, and at which part of the story the movie was in at the time.

The contrast of this method would be to find "pre-made" decks of cards for sentences in the language you are learning, but I find that it is harder to remember the items when the sentences are not as meaningful to you.

A key point for using SRS effectively is to use to review material already learned, not to learn new never before seen material. The article itself even mentions this.

(Also, Mnemosyne is my SRS of choice http://mnemosyne-proj.org/, but Anki is a good choice too.)

I am using Pleco on my phone as an SRS for Mandarin. (Setting it up to be a proper SRS hurts, though.)

The absolutely great thing about Pleco is that it is a great dictionary app and a document reader in the same app. When you see the solution of a flash card, it usually includes a handful of example sentences. You can then tap on words in these sentences and see their definition again... It is a little like getting stuck in Wikipedia - sometimes I spend half an hour only reading examples starting from my current flashcard.

I have no solid statistics on this, but I feel that the context really helps me to memorise things :)

I'd like to learn Mandarin.

Can you give details on how you're doing this?

Like what you use for initially learning the material and what you use for SRS?

For me, I downloaded a chinese deck from the shared Anki deck website. There's a series of ten of them. I also wanted to learn the strokes and how to say them and draw them, so I downloaded the "eStroke" app for my iPhone, and practiced drawing them in the air. Wasn't motivated enough to get ink and paper. :-) I also figured out how to do pinyin on my computer, and input strokes on the phone for character recognition. So, I dunno - I would do a few cards a day, but my retention was poor. I realized I was more interested in learning how to learn Chinese, rather than learning Chinese itself. And, doing the cards 10 minutes a day isn't enough - you have to be doing some sort of other activity with it simultaneously. I deleted the deck eventually. :)

Definitely - contact me at the email in my profile and I can tell you more about my specific approach for Mandarin. (Don't want to sidetrack the thread too much.)

Yes, please just say it here and share it with the greater community. :)

Please do sidetrack the thread!

I've previously had good experiences with ProVoc (and now iVocabulary, a fork of ProVoc) but stopped using it and instead use Duolingo now because I lacked a good flashcard resource. I didn't have the time to think up new flashcards and learn them on a regular basis. Where do you get your sentences from for Anki? Is there a good repository online that you'd recommend (preferably with some kind of community review)?

I recommend creating your own cards, they just feel more weighty. I did jump start my sentence deck with the 500 card starter deck from AllJapaneseAllTheTime (http://www.alljapaneseallthetime.com/blog/my-first-sentence-...). Yet those cards feel different. If I were to redo things I would start from zero and build cards as you go.

My process is to add 4 cards everyday. These sentences come from posts in my RSS feed. Over the years I found websites that interest me. Take for instance http://blog.esuteru.com/ which has a very 2ch style of news, not safe for work but often interesting. Or I'll stumble upon people's blogs. For example "KEN's": http://qoqpop.blog123.fc2.com/ He is a phone "otaku" who often travels to china and Mexico for business trips. I found his blog in a N900 related search. The open source community also has plenty of japanese bloggers. For instance http://d.hatena.ne.jp/naruoga/ is the blog of a Debian translator and a journalist who I found through the OpenPrinting working group.

Oh I forgot to mention another benefit of self deck creation: it grows with you.

Some words are so well known that new cards do not contain their pronunciation. A new card may have 7 kanji words but only the hiragana for only 2 of those words. Likewise a card may only contain translation for one or two words. As time goes on I also select more difficult sentences. In both cases a premade deck cannot match your learning curve like self-made decks can.

I must also give credit for AllJapaneseAllTheTime for getting me excited about learning and for how to use SRS.

A typical card of mine might be: Front: エナメル質は歯の歯冠の最表層にある、 Back: 質＝しつ//quality 歯＝は//tooth 歯冠＝しかん//tooth crown 最＝さい//most 表層＝ひょうそう//surface

That example has every pronunciation and translation. A real card would not have 歯 at all since I know it by heart. 質 and 最 would not have translations. Also notice how this is not a full sentence. Japanese often features many run-on sentences so I split them. Also notice there is no sentence scope translation.

AllJapaneseAllTheTime now suggests a newer format which features partial-ization of compound words which should work better for new decks: http://www.alljapaneseallthetime.com/blog/10000-sentences-is...

Can you comment on how are you translating the sentences at esuteru to add to your deck? Ie, if you can adequately translate those sentences already, seems like you don't even need to study them in the first place?

I've been using a standalone SRS app on my iPhone (StickyStudy) and about a year ago learned all N4/N5 vocab (ie, not just the kanji). But I'm having trouble making the jump to full-on sentences/text like that since there are too many unknown kanji or grammatical structures. StickyStudy does have a bunch of sample sentences for any one kanji or vocab word, which is great, but the learning focuses on the kanji or vocab words themselves, not sentences. So the ability to use the kanji in context of sentences is much harder.

I'd love to get to the point of being able to read webpages like that.

You're right, what I am getting out of the sentences is most often the vocab.

Earlier on I could not understand most sentences. At that time I would select the sentences I thought I knew. My understanding has expanded over time I think with great credit to anime and drama. I'm at ~330 series of anime/drama completed. Even before I started studying I had maybe 100 series completed.

Still a big thing for me is to card a sentence even if I do not understand it. The critical attribute I am looking for is "Is this a sentence I would like to learn?". Once it is in the deck I should understand it at some point in time. It may take a year but at least by then I will be able to pronounce every word in said sentence.

Even still there are some sentences I do not understand but those are often found in subjects I haven’t explored. Computer interfaces are 100% ok. Tech news likewise.

Start small and just never stop. Some of my first sentences were from children’s comics. I even have a few from pokemon games.

Speaking about 'repositories of sentences', you can try Tatoeba.org. It’s not without its faults, but it’s a fairly large downloadable (CC-BY) database of translated sentences.

I'm interested that you chose sentences rather than words. That seems super smart now that I think about it because you can pick up idioms and word relationships as well, and it's probably a little less boring too.

You're right, it is much more interesting. A few of my cards are a single word and I've found those hard to remember.

Instead sentences also let me remember context. Some cards might be speculation on a video game long since released. Others topical news reports long since over. Others might be internet slang which you would not want to memorize without the context to avoid confusion. I think this is vital since Japanese is so context sensitive.

Did you use it for kana too? How did that work for you?

I downloaded a nice kana set (with audio) but somehow they just didn't click. Anki eventually classed most of them as leeches and I stopped trying.

I must admit to not remembering how I handled kana. I know I did not start it until I was a decent way through the heisig book. I only remember even that because my mother was doing a masters in the university's German/Japanese department and one of the Japanese professors mentioned how odd the order was.

Don't worry too much about kana. It feels impossible now but it will become second nature. At some point you will hate it when someone uses romaji since kana is so much easier to read.

I do remember using the "Remembering the Kana" book: http://www.amazon.co.jp/Remembering-Kana-The-Hiragana-Kataka... which I can recommend 100%. The 3 hours claim is accurate from what I remember but do follow the book's suggested breaks.

> At some point you will hate it when someone uses romaji since kana is so much easier to read.

I'm currently reading The Structure of the Japanese Language, and that is indeed the case (the book doesn't use kana, maybe it was difficult to typeset at that time). And I'm not at all proficient with the language at this point, nor have I studied kana specifically. I've struggled a lot with it initially, but consistently refused to read or write romaji, which may have helped.

(Having just recently returned to the RTK deck after a break, I feel it's not enough and I probably should be working through words or sentences already, maybe in parallel. Thank you for describing the various aspects of your workflow in this thread!)

I’ll second this vote, this book is very good. When I learned from it there were two separate editions, now they are together, which is great.

To get over the hump of learning hiragana and katakana, I think you're better off using any mnemonic trick you can find. That's how I learned them as an adult.

This site looks like it might be on the right track. http://drmoku.com/hiragana-free/

did you make your own cards? or are pre-made cards available?

Just wanted to reply to you so you'll see it: I mentioned my card creation algo in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6462709

Cool. Thanks so much.