There’s another way to get audio for your flashcards, which is to take the audio directly from native speakers. The disadvantage of this is you can’t choose what they are going to say unless you pay them for a language lesson. You can do this of course, on italki or something similar, but you can also use something like a podcast or a TV show as an audio source. Most TV shows have hard subs but if you can find a video that also has softsubs it will save you the trouble of using Whisper to get the transcription or transcribing the audio yourself and cross checking it with the hard subs. The advantage of this is that you are working towards understanding content at a native level while doing this, and you also know the pronunciation is going to be 100 percent authentic and trustworthy as something you can imitate. These are considerable advantages, so I would definitely recommend using native speaker audio as much as you can and putting it on the back of your flashcards.

asbplayer and yomitan are a good pair of browser extensions that can help with the workflow of making flashcards from native level content.

Finally, I have Anki give me the most recently added sentences first. I am constantly adding new stuff that is highly targeted to the words I need to work on most to my Anki deck, so studying the most recently added sentences first keeps my deck highly relevant to what I need to target most.

To sum things up, use Anki to study words and phrases on the boundary of your knowledge daily for 20 to 30 minutes a day. Use the leech threshold to suspend cards that have too weak of memory for Anki to be useful. Put high quality audio on the back of the card and imitate it. Don’t use your native language on your Anki cards to help suppress all other languages than your target language. Use images and audio for anchoring. Use pinyin on the back of the card if you need it to understand which syllables were said, but try to reduce your use of pinyin over time. Finally, study 6 to 10 character phrases or sentences and use images sometimes to give your brain more context and learn more efficiently.

What do you do with the leeches you suspended? Simply go through your list of leeches every so often and identify the word that tripped you up. If you still want to learn that word, find or create a different phrase or sentence that uses it. Put the meaning image on the front of the card to help anchor memory of the reading, as the word is still likely difficult. Since you are learning phrases, you can always get a new phrase for your leeches, so you don’t need to waste time trying to learn a phrase that’s not working for you right now. This is the reason why the low leech threshold is not a big deal, you’re not going to miss anything because you can just make another card.

So, that covers your 20 to 30 minutes of Anki per day. What should you do to study now that you’re done with that? There are three things you should focus on besides Anki. That is, practice composing sentences in Mandarin, practice speaking and listening by shadowing and chorusing, and practice reading and speaking by extensive reading, reading aloud sometimes. You can also take practice quizzes to find which words you need to target the most, but this can be a secondary concern as you can often find what you need to practice from extensive reading.

Composing sentences should be done for 15 minutes a day every day. This practice is how you are going to bridge the gap to being able to speak conversationally. Kagi Translate is useful in this practice. Here’s how you do it: pick a phrase you want to be able to use more effectively in your conversations, probably of 4 to 10 characters in length. Then type or speak maybe three original sentences that use the phrase. Have Kagi Translate translate the phrase back into your native language. This will help you understand the nuanced meaning of the sentence you composed, and at this point you can alter the meaning of the sentence in your native language to get closer to the original meaning you wanted. Finally, you can translate the revised sentence back into Mandarin and choose the variant with the right nuance that you want. This practice helps you understand mistakes you made while creating the sentence and gives you a lot of feedback on the nuances of the sentence and the words you used in it. If your original sentence was incorrect, put the new and improved sentence in your Anki deck with an image and a TTS reading to reinforce the memory. Since it’s a sentence you tried to write in the first place, the memory should be good enough that Anki can be useful. This practice is highly recommended to move towards being conversational.

You can also narrate what you’re doing in Mandarin. Say things like ”我去洗手间“ or “我要去洗手间” when you go for a pish. Say things like “我在给土豆去呀” when you are prepping potatoes for your dinner. Kagi Translate and Pleco can help you find the right words for this if you don’t know them. This is a great way to reinforce your vocabulary with anchoring, since you are associating the action, the space you’re doing it in, and the senses of doing the action with the vocabulary in Mandarin. Just do this as much as you can, no matter how silly or stupid it might make you feel. That embarrassment feeling can also reinforce the memory, which is what we want. So doing this in front of other people is ideal, especially if they think you are a psycho for doing it. You should do this as much as possible.

Extensive reading should also be done as much as possible. “Extensive reading” means you can understand 97% of the characters on the page or more. “Intensive reading” means you can understand 90 to 97%. “Fucked up reading” means you can understand 0 to 90%. You want to avoid fucked up reading completely and aim for extensive reading as it’s more efficient for learning than intensive reading. “How do I read stuff that I can understand 97% of when I’m stupid and don’t know anything?” is a very important question to be able to answer. Luckily, there are the Mandarin Companion Breakthrough Level graded readers. These are the first graded readers you should try. You can move on from them once you get to a reading speed of about 100 characters per minute. If you cannot understand them at 97%, that’s OK. What you’re going to do in that case is take phrases from the graded reader that you can understand and put them in your Anki deck. This is a situation where you can justify spending more than 30 minutes a day on Anki, as the goal is to bootstrap you quickly into being able to read the breakthrough reader. You can do the reading practice in Pleco, which lets you read any epub or pdf which you can find on the internet, or you can use Du Chinese to avoid some of the effort of finding stuff at a level you can use for extensive reading. The rule of thumb is to set a one minute timer and if you have to look more than 3 words up in a minute, you should look for something easier to stay in extensive reading.

When you are doing extensive reading, highlight phrases you don’t know well in Pleco and add them to your Anki deck. Pleco has built-in functionality to do this but it takes some setup. If you can’t figure it out then feel free to ask. This is a very important source of sentences for your Anki. If you use Du Chinese you can use its built in SRS, focusing on being able to pronounce the word in its context in the sentence.

Intensive reading is also beneficial as you get exposure to a wider variety of new words without things being too overwhelming. In this case it’s the most beneficial to read along with the TTS. You can do this in Pleco or Du Chinese.

Du Chinese is definitely an app that I would recommend as you get access to well-graded stories and can easily read at your level up to the point you can start reading novels at a native level. You have to pay to get access to entire stories, but it can definitely be worth it if you have money.

Heavenly Path is also worth mentioning at this point. They have links to a lot of resources you can use in your extensive reading practice. You must click this link and put it in your bookmarks if you do nothing else: https://heavenlypath.notion.site/

Shadowing and chorusing is done by going on a video site, finding a video on your level, and imitating the speaker as they speak. You got some good options here. GoEast Mandarin, Mandarin Click, and Xiaogua Chinese are all good choices for beginners that have graded their videos to a variety of levels. Little Fox Chinese has videos geared towards children that are not as well graded, but introduce a wider variety of vocabulary to you that you will need to know at some point. If you shadow a video that has less than like 93% words you know, you need to bookmark it, come back to it again the next day and again in a week, and shadow it again each time. To this end it’s best to shadow videos that you find the most interesting or that are a series in a story. Shadowing TV shows once you’re able to is ideal for this.

Chorusing means you read the hard subs on the video in unison with the speaker. Doing this means you can keep up with the speaker with your reading speed. This is an ideal situation and you won’t be able to do it right away. That’s OK, just keep trying.

Dong Chinese is a paid website that helps you select media for shadowing and chorusing. You select words you don’t know to view the short pronunciation and definition. Dong Chinese keeps track of the words you click and uses that to inform the best level of videos you can currently shadow. They also have quizzes that you can easily harvest sentences from to your Anki. For example, they have images annotated with captions which you can take phrases from and already have a highly relevant image for anchoring. Dong Chinese is one of the best ways to do practice that targets the boundary of your knowledge.