Unsurprisingly, you need passive activities to improve your passive language ability (for example, your listening comprehension), and your need active ones to improve your active language ability (producing the language). The size of your your passive vocabulary can be very different from the size of your active vocabulary.
I’m planning on doing a couple of posts in the next few weeks about how I use flashcards, and why.
The first premise of my flashcard theory is that audio flashcards are the go. I’ll explain later. Don’t question it, just do.
Here’s how to get them using ChinesePod (on Google Chrome) .
Even if you don’t listen to many of their podcasts (which I don’t recommend – if you have a subscription, their podcasts and the ability to listen to dialogue only versions are extremely good) it may be worth paying for a subscription to have access to their glossary.
Step 1: Go to the ChinesePod glossary page.
Step 2: Put in your search (I recommend writing the characters, rather than the Pinyin).
Step 3: Click the play button, then right click on the button and select ‘Inspect Element’
Step 4: This little box thing will come up. Click the ‘network’ tab.
Step 5: Press the sentence’s play button again. You will see something like this come up in the box.
Step 6: Click on the ‘rec’ one (not the other one). You should see a ‘Request URL’ that starts with http://s3. Select and copy this address.
Step 7: Add a new card to Anki. Simply paste the URL into either (or both) card fields.
Step 8: Copy the sentence from ChinesePod.
Step 9: Paste the sentence into the deck. That’s it! Rinse and repeat.
