Good morning. Huge wall of text incoming, so please feel free to take it slow or ask for clarification.

First of all, you should forget about making translation the cornerstone of your Mandarin practice. Focus on understanding and being able to produce Mandarin from Mandarin. Translation is basically a huge waste of time. You can leave it to the machines as a way to check your understanding.

I personally think the most essential app for studying Mandarin is Pleco. Not only is it the best dictionary app to such an extent that other apps are forced to integrate it, you can also get a reader that will let you click on the words you don’t know and get a definition instantly. You can go to the entry of the word, view the breakdown into characters, and look at the entries in the Outlier dictionary to understand the etymology of characters better. Focus on encoding the memories during your journeys through the dictionary. You can also use phrases from example sentences from the guifan cidian in your Anki deck. I can’t recommend highly enough getting the basic bundle on Pleco and the Outlier Essentials dictionary. It’s more expensive than a month of some of the subscription apps but it’s considered a core item and it’s a one-time cost, so you don’t need to pay over and over.

Of course you should also be using Anki. The SRS integrated into Pleco uses an algorithm with many undesirable properties, but the FSRS integrated into Anki does a pretty good job of showing you cards only when it’s absolutely necessary, which makes the time spent on Anki more effective. How you use Anki is important. First of all, you should go into the deck settings once a month and click “optimize all presets.” What does it do? Who knows, don’t worry about it. It is not even that important. Second of all, what is Anki even for? Many people will say it is to “learn new words” or “prevent forgetting” but this is actually not true. How you should be thinking of memory in the first place is as a “quality that things I can remember have more or less of on a spectrum.” What Anki is, therefore, is a “device that I can use to give the things I can remember more of the quality of memory.” So, Anki is not useful for “things I can remember that I barely know or don’t know at all,” because it is not very good at increasing the memory of things that cannot be remembered. It is also not useful for “things I can remember quite well,” because the amount you can remember such things more is barely any. Therefore, Anki should only be used for “things I can kind of remember.” This is actually the most important thing to understand about Anki and will save you a lot of grief.

There are some corollaries to this. It follows from this that you should avoid making Anki cards for things you don’t have good memory of in the first place. However, you can’t always do this, so you may end up wasting time on cards you don’t remember well. Anki has a built in tool to help you cull things you can’t remember well, which is called the “leech threshold,” but it’s set high enough that it’s not that useful. What you actually want to do is set the leech threshold as low as you can stand. I recommend 2 or 3. This means that if you get a flashcard wrong 2 or 3 times, it will be suspended. At that point, you won’t see the card anymore. This may be emotionally difficult or make you feel stupid at first. I can only suggest getting over it, as suspending a card doesn’t mean that you no longer have the chance to learn that word. We’ll come back to this soon.

The second corollary is that it is definitely a horrible idea to do all of your language learning solely in Anki. It is a tool that’s limited to increasing memory of things you already kind of know. It cannot effectively move things you don’t know to that state or help you actually have a conversation in the target language. This is why I say it’s essential to incorporate Anki, but you should actually limit the time you use it per day. You should spend no more than about a half hour per day on Anki, and if there are still cards you didn’t get to after 30 minutes, you should simply leave them undone. There’s another deck configuration change that’s related to this, but it requires some further explanation.

The third corollary is that we should look for ways to move things from the category of “I don’t know this at all” to “I kind of know this.” Techniques that let us do this are what allow us to broaden what we can learn with Anki. There’s one technique of this type you shouldn’t use, which is including a language other than the target language on your Anki cards. That’s because suppressing the part of your brain that processes other languages helps you use the target language more effectively. There are broadly two categories of techniques you can use to do this.

Category 1 is “learning stuff.” That is, if you don’t know something at all, you should try to learn it better to the point that you can put it in your Anki. Think about this in terms of constructing a schema and building an interconnected network of knowledge. You can do things like think about how a word relates to other words, think about related words and antonyms, practice using the word in a sentence, phrase, or conversation, read the word in context in an example sentence, or have the Pleco TTS read example sentences containing the word to you and repeat the sentence after the TTS said it to you. The goal is to gain some experience with the word so you are familiar enough to put it in your Anki and get it right within the first two or three tries.

Category 2 is “anchoring stuff to a context.” This means you should give your brain some related things it can glom onto to relate the word you’re trying to learn to something else. That means you should avoid studying a word by itself in Anki, and you should especially avoid studying a character by itself! The reason is that there is no context for your brain to use to create the memory you want! So, instead of studying a word or a character in Anki, you should study phrases or sentences! I found the sweet spot for me is around 6 to 10 characters in a phrase in my Anki deck. This is extremely important to understand! You must not study characters or individual words or you will be wasting a ton of time. This goes for any language you want to study in Anki.

Other types of context can also be used to make your Anki cards more useful. For example, you can have the target phrase of 6 to 10 characters on the front of your card, but maybe you can put the entire sentence on the back of it to get more context. Or, you can paste that 6 to 10 character phrase into image search and find the image that resonates the most with the meaning. Finally, you can acquire audio clips for the phrase. This is actually my most recommended part of my learning system that uses Anki. There are a couple ways to do this, but first let’s go over what a card might look like.

The front will have a written phrase in Mandarin. No pinyin, possibly an image can be on front for anchoring, but not all the time, since you won’t always have a picture when learning. Maybe 10 percent of cards have an image on the front, only my cards that were the most difficult at the time I learned them. When I review the card, I read the Mandarin phrase aloud and I visualize the meaning in my head.

On the back of the card, I’ll have an image on maybe 40 percent of cards. I can use this to easily check whether I understand the meaning without having to stop suppressing my English in my thoughts. Since I can stay in Mandarin mode, images are more useful as an anchor here. Once I read aloud the card and imagine its meaning, I flip the card over. On the back of the card I always have spoken audio, which plays automatically. I mentally compare the way I said the phrase to the way the card said the phrase, and I repeat the phrase again. I also have the pinyin on some of the cards, but I’m moving away from this as I learn more and have gotten used to the way the pinyin corresponds to the pronunciation. The audio is enough to determine whether I read the card right or not, including tones. If I got close enough, which is typically quite close including pronouncing the tones, initial, and final sounds similarly to the audio on the card, then I mark the card as good and move on to the next. If I didn’t understand the meaning or didn’t get the reading right, I mark the card as again and proceed. Finally, if I read it right, but was relatively slow to be able to pronounce everything or had to take a couple tries to read it and the first one wasn’t right, I mark it as hard and proceed.

What you get with this system is a systematic and targeted practice that extends the boundary of your knowledge of speaking and reading with instant feedback. You should spend maybe 20-30 minutes on this per day and no more.

There is one elephant in the room that I’ve left out completely, which is how to get the audio for the card. There are several different ways you can do this. The most expedient is to use a TTS on the phrase. There are some TTS voices that are fairly natural these days, and you can add them to your Anki cards. I recommend Microsoft Yunxi the most. It has pretty natural pronunciation of tones and can even drop the pitch over the course of the sentence which happens naturally in most sentences in Mandarin. You can search for “anki edge tts” for some programs which will let you use this voice for personal use using the same endpoints used by Microsoft Edge for TTS speech production. Another good alternative for the TTS is Kagi Translate, which you have to pay a subscription for, but which also helps you break down sentences and the nuances between different potential translations. You can simply download the audio from Kagi Translate, but it takes a little more manual work than some of the Edge TTS solutions.

I’m hitting character limit, so wait for post #2.