I have two main questions:
- What order and in what frequency should people use the different parts of Domino's learning resources and,
- Am I missing a place to rearrange and think about existing vocabulary?
To expand on point 1, currently I study about.. maybe 40 minutes a night, or that's my goal. Lately, I've just been going through the lessons, wherein I listen and watch, but also I write down all the characters and phrases in a notebook to help cement them a bit in my mind.
However, I'm not sure when to do the flash cards, so I'm behind.
Should I do the flash cards after every lesson? Alternating between learning/videos and the flash cards? When should I pause to review flash cards after some time? A week and go back and look them all up again?
Moving on to 2, at the end of each chapter or whatever we have a lot of new words. I know there's a sum up at the end of each chapter and I know there's the story we're learning, but I feel like there's a BUNCH of variations that we could be quizzed on, like "how do you say 'SHE does X, Y, Z' and 'THEY do X, Y, Z' and 'THEY do X, Y, Z also'" and so on and so forth and mixing this up would reinforce sentence structure and stuff for me, I think, both thinking how to say something from English to Chinese and then seeing Chinese sentences and having to decode them but ONLY with the learned vocab.
Does this exist on the site? If not, would it be a good suggestion?
Thanks in advance, Dan
I put the domino app on my phone, so that I can learn flashcard thruout the day. When I have a second, like lunchtime or maybe waiting for water to boil for tea. Things like that. Since it's on my phone it is portable.
They do give a guide I think in how to use - top of page https://www.dominochinese.com/pages/study-resources
but if this is your only resource I would keep up to date with flash cards if using Dominos system or use the Anki. Massive amounts of input are required to get the chinese in our heads so lots of listening, speaking to yourself in the language etc. So yes I would do the flash cards after every lesson, maybe also repeat lessons if need be. But also I would avoid perfection you want to cover a lot of ground of the language.
I also tried following their guide but it really is a lot. So what I do is watch a lesson each day (I try at least ;) ) and take notes at the same time. The notes are just for my brain to pay attention and learn the writing and pinyin. Then throughout the day I use Pleco as my flashcard app. If you do one lesson a day you get tons of vocab, so I have to review on average 150 words a day to not fall behind + the new words learned in the lesson which can amount to around 50 flashcards. I have sentences in there as well and after I uncover the card the audio plays which helps me correct my pronounciation. Honestly if I'd do the course book as well I'd be overwhelmed with the time needed. I enjoy the course a lot but I believe the promise to be fluent in 6 months is a bit exaggerated if you study at a normal pace.
Oh interesting, so you... I've never used Pleco, gonna download it now, you manually put the words in that you wanna study to Pleco as you go along the lesson and then it reviews it?
This is appealing to me because the flashcard app on Domino has some.. quirks. Like, for instance, when reviewing flashcards, I'll mark a bunch of them as forgotten or whatever, but when it loops back around to show you the forgotten ones... if you say STILL forgotten, it will keep showing you the same one until you say you remember it, which is not that helpful....
pleco is quite good. There's a complete list of all 20 levels vocab somewhere on this site, or at least used to be. Then you'll get vocab + sentences. If you use the pleco deck from the individual levels you'll only get the vocab without sample sentences. I don't know why they changed that up. If you're interested I can upload the old pleco list and post the link here. Additionally you can add words from the dictionary to your flashcard vocabulary which I feel might be useful once I become a bit more advanced. But beware, Pleco spaced repetition is not free, so you must shell out some money for all the functions. I bought the beginner pack (bunch of dictionaries, flashcard function and some voices) and additionally the sentence pronunciation function so it sounds nicer. It's quite expensive for an app, I paid around 40€ all in all, but I feel it's worth it.
There's a complete list of all 20 levels vocab somewhere on this site, or at least used to be. Then you'll get vocab + sentences.
Oh man, that sounds like EXACTLY what I want.Yeah, if you ... can upload it or even tell me where to search on the site? That would be amazing.
I don't mind paying money, honestly 40 euros isn't that much if the app does what I want.
Here you go: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1oMW4NQP1cVJIO0LwJQpE0noGWWo6i0tQ/view?usp=sharing There are minor mistakes in the file but you can edit it on the fly when you review your vocabulary. Also I think there was some restructuring on the course, hence I think they took down this file. I'd say 99% of the words in it are in the right order, but some are not. Then you just have to manually add some. I'm glad I can help though, learning is tough enough as it is
Thank you! Much appreciated! Gonna try this out and see how it goes.
One thing that's curious is they say there is "automatically generated" Pleco cards available on each lesson overview, but I don't see that anywhere....
When I go to the lesson overview, I think, it looks like this: https://imgur.com/a/6lDCXTL
I don't see the Pleco stuff anywhere...
Shouldn't matter, because I just got that list from Max, but... just curious.
It's on the level overview for the whole level. I downloaded one but it didn't have all sentences introduced in the vocab review so I stuck to the list I uploaded
Oh for the whole level, of course.
Thank you again for the vocab list! I downloaded it correctly and I'm using it on Pleco and it works great, thanks!