In my continued slow burn learning of Chinese I have added another tool: Anki.

For those unfamiliar, Anki is a tool for training knowledge with flash cards. It supports lots of different formats for each card in the decks. And, it has some nice techniques for showing cards over increasing periods of time to assist with long term recall.

I had used flashcards and flashcard like systems (Duolingo) in the past and without much success. I actually progressed most the way through Duolingo’s older Chinese course due to simply memorising the short-term tasks for each section and some luck from the limited input options.

I have found Anki to be much better than Duolingo for a few reasons:

I am able to customise the decks to have either single characters, words, or full sentences.
The use of audio on some card decks is useful
The algorithm for showing new cards over time and recurring older cards has led to better long-term rather than short-term retention

But most importantly, I have been able to pair memorising the symbol with writing the symbol:

When given the English prompt for each card, I will make my guess by drawing out the character by hand. This has greatly improved my ability to recall the written symbol instead of an amorphous concept of the symbol.

Before this, even common symbols like 你，对 or 的 I would be able to recognise when reading but if asked I would fail to correctly replicate.

With this change the recall and memory when using LingQ for reading short stories has greatly increased comprehension.

Input	Output	Tool
Chinese Characters/Sentences (汉字)	Speak english definition	Anki
Chinese Stories (汉字)	Interpret the story	LingQ
English definition	Written 汉字	Anki

This solves the input -> output and output -> input problem I was having.

I still need to figure out the right way to handle listening and speaking that is comfortable and easy to practice. Once that is at a decent basic level I will hire a tutor and practical progress can really begin!