u/PezBynx

So over the past few years I have attempted to learn Chinese and I’ve tried to base it on how I learned Spanish, I’ve been learning Spanish since 2020 and got to b1 over about a year, and currently I’m about c1 I’d say basically I learned a 100 words in Anki then I just went on to watch and read content from there, I’m pretty sure I made my own Anki deck at some point but I didn’t stick with it for long, so I just learned words just by watching stuff from that point forward.

Now I always knew that Spanish was so easy in terms of vocabulary because it’s so similar to English, with about 100 words and all the cognates you can usually parse a test, so I knew that vocabulary would be a lot more important with Chinese, but I had to issues (really 3 because of listening comprehension), I had to learn words in Chinese and also learn how to read them in Hanzi, so my solution was to download core vocab decks to get me started since I could understand and read close to nothing in actual content, I tried a few but the one I used the most was the; Refold 1k Mandarin Simplified which I someone learned 400 words in, the problem is that I really don’t like Anki all that much but when I was learning words with that deck I just could not learn words, looking at my stats 50% of the time I clicked good and 40% of the time I clicked again, I would literally look at the same card over and over and over again maybe about 30 times, sometimes it was the meaning, sometimes it was the reading, but either way just learning 10-20 new cards a day I would spend over an hour on Anki each day reviewing so I just couldn’t stick with it. And it also demotivated me to even learn Chinese

So what was the problem here? The deck? The fact that it was premade? How I was using it? The pics is basically how the deck worded with an example sentence that I usually didn’t know what most of the words were, also there were some words that I didn’t see why they were in the deck under 1k words like basketball for example.

So over the past few years I have attempted to learn Chinese and I’ve tried to base it on how I learned Spanish, I’ve been learning Spanish since 2020 and got to b1 over about a year, and currently I’m about c1 I’d say basically I learned a 100 words in Anki then I just went on to watch and read content from there, I’m pretty sure I made my own Anki deck at some point but I didn’t stick with it for long, so I just learned words just by watching stuff from that point forward.

Now I always knew that Spanish was so easy in terms of vocabulary because it’s so similar to English, with about 100 words and all the cognates you can usually parse a test, so I knew that vocabulary would be a lot more important with Chinese, but I had to issues (really 3 because of listening comprehension), I had to learn words in Chinese and also learn how to read them in Hanzi, so my solution was to download core vocab decks to get me started since I could understand and read close to nothing in actual content, I tried a few but the one I used the most was the; Refold 1k Mandarin Simplified which I someone learned 400 words in, the problem is that I really don’t like Anki all that much but when I was learning words with that deck I just could not learn words, looking at my stats 50% of the time I clicked good and 40% of the time I clicked again, I would literally look at the same card over and over and over again maybe about 30 times, sometimes it was the meaning, sometimes it was the reading, but either way just learning 10-20 new cards a day I would spend over an hour on Anki each day reviewing so I just couldn’t stick with it. And it also demotivated me to even learn Chinese

So what was the problem here? The deck? The fact that it was premade? How I was using it? The pics is basically how the deck worded with an example sentence that I usually didn’t know what most of the words were, also there were some words that I didn’t see why they were in the deck under 1k words like basketball for example.