Studying Chinese

Both Sparkle and I are using the computer program Anki to learn Chinese. (Well, I also take a class, but I use Anki to help me remember the vocabulary.) I recently came across an old idea made new again, in my new Chinese textbook: copywork. I'd previously avoided copywork in Chinese because I thought it would involve copying the Chinese characters. I'd totally overlooked the idea of doing copywork of the pinyin.

Here's Sparkle doing her Chinese. I've taken the vocabulary from the book "Chinese for Children" which I got in China. Anki presents her with a word or phrase in Chinese characters. She tries to remember the pronunciation and meaning. Then she uses her right hand on the mouse/trackball to click "show answer." Then the computer shows the pinyin for the pronunciation, the English meaning, and says the word or phrase. Then Sparkle's job is to copy the pinyin, including tone marks, using her left hand. Finally she marks the word or phrases as "again," "hard," "good," or "easy." I'm blessed that Sparkle's handwriting is up to the task.

I had been warned to not introduce pinyin too early for a couple of reasons. (1) Because the letters are the same as English, but make slightly different sounds, pinyin could confuse a beginning reader of English. (2) When learning pinyin early, students tend to become dependent on the pinyin and don't learn the characters. I think that Sparkle's grasp of the English language is strong enough that I don't need to worry about (1), and I think that a continual presentation of the Chinese characters without pinyin will take care of (2).

I have started a similar process to Sparkle's with my Anki deck. I'm really horrible when it comes to remembering and pronouncing the tones. The rest of my pronunciation is really bad too. However, I'm hoping that I can learn to reproduce the pinyin correctly (at least the letters, if not the tones), and thus have a mental model of the differences, even if I can't produce them.

Have I mentioned that I love Anki?