Inst HSK6 completion and beyond

[Inst]

My right hand really hurts given how much I've been writing today. Well, it's better than your left hand hurting, no?

In practice, I only managed to get 4 chapters done, but I'm well within range of finishing the textbook tomorrow.

I also found a nice selection from Dushu called "什么是政治德性", or "What is Political Virtue?", with references to Hobbes and Machiavelli. I'll translate this off for you; it's roughly within my reading range and sounds fun.

[Inst]

Looks like I failed to reach my goal today, something came up and I was rather distracted for much of the day. Still short 25 words, and not really in the mood to cram for it.

[Inst]

Just finished the last 25 words. So I guess the problem now is retention, huh? I just tried the Dushu essay on political virtue, and guess what? Too many words fell out. Same with recent attempts at dictionary look-ups relative to Xiandai Hanyu Cidian.

But the frame is finally done, I suppose, now to fill in the house.

[Inst]

So, the rough outline is, after I take a break, I review the 400 words in HSK 6 chapters 25-32, hopefully in one day. Then I do 33-40, then HSK 5 24-36. Hmmm, I may be better off trying to do 25-32 review today instead, because I have wickedly strong insomnia, and was otherwise trying to quit smoking.

[Inst]

I've been optimistic about this lately. I reviewed HSK 6 25-28, with the first page of 29 so far.

I don't think it's impossible to bring the entire HSK 6 vocabulary in the books to "review" status within 10 days, but I think I'd be better off consolidating the HSK 6 vocabulary I've learned alongside preparing to finish the HSK 4 workbook.

[Inst]

I'm doing review right now, but I'm going to formalize the Chinese character-based based method as an upgrade to HanziDB. The motivation underlying this is that Chinese-English translations are often imprecise or reliable, so it's necessary to have, likewise, an inventory of Chinese-Chinese definitions. And HSK is limited to 2500 characters, which doesn't even get to the Middle School level of character knowledge (3500 words is expected at Grade 9, where 初中 terminates). So the following is an inventory of characters, with the objective being to get at least to 5,000, alongside words that start with the given character.

Definitions are, of course, pirated, but this is primarily intended for private study. Perhaps Sinophones can help come up with Open Source definitions if this excel ever becomes mature.

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/ ... sp=sharing

[Inst]

Maybe this is a bad idea?

http://www.baike.com/wiki/频率词典

Translation:

A type of dictionary edited and arranged in accordance with word frequency.

I actually have a demand for this type of dictionary for English, since I want to expand my lexicon from 80th percentile to 99th percentile.

[Inst]

Still struggling here and technically "resting", despite what amounts to an 16 hour study day. I did a pass through the ~825 words of HSK 6 chapters 25-40 today. This wasn't multi-pass, or repetitive, but it was a pass.

Also, I finished collating the 9900-10000 section of my little HanziDB dictionary. I've noticed quite a few flaws in it, for instance, it's counting traditional Chinese as separate words. Moreover, HanziDB is often using rare words that only see use in Classical Chinese (and when Classical Chinese is quoted in Standard Mandarin). To cut things down, I'm cross-checking the figures with Tongyong Guifan Hanzi Biao, i.e, the standard Hanzi list of something ilke 8000 characters, and only including these figures.

I've been thinking about whether I should read Moonwalking with Einstein, but at the same time, it's driving me to the flaws of the Memory Palace technique. Memory Palace is good for memorizing and returning information on a task, but it's not good for interconnecting the information.

One way to deal with that would be to start to string words into sentences, even if I'm unfamiliar and worried about being grammatically correct. But I've always seen this as a multi-phase project; I can write well at the HSK 3 level, but not necessarily at the HSK 5 or 6 level, but it might be more useful to start stringing groups of words together to integrate the theoria and praxis levels, since I'm pretty recalcitrant against SRS software and Memory Palace techniques. I'd of course, have to improve my grammar afterwards, and the HSK 5 level has tons of grammar information.

[Inst]

I guess I can dedicate the next 60 or so hours to working on getting the 825 words of HSK 6 chapters 25-40 into my head. I keep on saying rest day, rest day, rest day, but honestly what's resting? In practice, I end up getting obsessed by the textbook and the vocabulary list that I need to use, even as I end up using the time in an extremely inefficient way.

What I really want to do is to go back through HSK 1-4 review, and then get the workbook done. But I'm scared I'll forget the HSK 6 words in chapters 25-40, when I see a reverse approach as actually quite useful given that I've probably reviewed the rest of the material like 10 times already, and the reverse approach equally distributes time spent studying material.

[Inst]

Just finished a pass through (copy the words once) the 825 words. I've recently discovered that reading blogs, like a certain one discussing better methods of teaching Chinese to children, is actually quite relaxing. In that case, they were discussing how schoolchildren in more traditional schools would be expected to copy out 20 words 20 times nightly to learn Chinese. Of course it was critical, and referenced a spaced repetition founder's work on memory.

One entertaining thing is, though, reading this kind of stuff helps me concentrate and learn better even if the Chinese text has no relation to the material I'm studying right now.

The problem right now is that, if I want to use reading to obtain practice, the material in the HSK 6 textbook creates many many gaps so reading is a bit of a struggle. That's the problem of not completely grasping the material and skipping ahead.