You put a lot of effort into building, maintaining and studying your Chinese flashcard deck, but are you missing out on an opportunity to make it even more beneficial to your Chinese learning?
Category: Chinese Grammar
Why redundancy is good for language learning
The 17th rule in Dr Wozniak’s 20 Rules for Formulating Knowledge is about redundancy in the learning process.
The importance of context in Chinese flashcards
The sixteenth rule in the 20 Rules for Formulating Knowledge is “Context cues simplify wording”. Dr Wozniak explains that you should feel free to include personalised context hints in your flashcards to simplify them. A key point to take away is that your flashcards are for you and should be as personalised as possible, so having your own individual notes and context prompts is a good thing.
Using emotional states to remember Chinese
The fifteenth rule in 20 Rules for Formulating Knowledge is “rely on emotional states”. Let’s see how you can apply this to learning Chinese.
Key Chinese grammar structure: modifier + de + noun (的)
This grammar structure is one of the most basic and important features of Chinese grammar: modifier + 的 + noun
Personalise your Chinese learning
The fourteenth rule in the 20 Rules for Learning is “personalise and provide examples”. Dr Wozniak makes the valuable point that it’s easier to retain material long term when you include personal examples for it in your learning.
Refer to other memories
Knowledge doesn’t exist in isolation, and this is especially true for language learning. To get good at Chinese, it’s important to build 语感: a natural sense for the language.
5 ways to optimise your Chinese flashcards
What makes an optimal Chinese flashcard? Rule #12 in Dr Wozniak’s 20 Rules for Formulating Knowledge is “optimize wording”. This concerns making flashcards for general knowledge acquisition. While it does apply somewhat to language learning, acquiring a foreign language is something of a special case. How can you optimize wording for flashcards in a language you’re trying to learn?
Interference when learning Chinese
This is the eleventh article in this series based on Dr Piotr Wozniaks 20 Rules for Formulating Knowledge. The eleventh rule is “combat interference”.
Avoid enumerations
In the previous article in this series, we looked at why sets are damaging to learning and what to do about them. The first priority is to avoid sets completely, but when that’s not possible, the next best thing is to turn a set into an enumeration. This is Rule #10 in the 20 Rules for Formulating Knowledge.
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