How to study Chinese from an HSK textbook:

When I first opened my HSK 6 textbooks, having never studied Chinese from a textbook, I was at a loss as what to do. After trial and error and input from John from Outlier Linguistics, I have a routine I think is working pretty well.

My main focus is on the chapter text. I completely ignore everything but the passage and do a combination of listening, reading, and flashcard review with the text. This is the detailed routine I am currently using:

Main study:

• 1-2x listen (optional)
• 2-3x listening while only looking
• 1x read intensively. I find the sentence mode in LingQ helpful for this part.
• 1x read while listening

After this I make flashcards from the passage (sentence cards in anki and vocab cards in Pleco) and then move on to review previously studied passages. Since I have a digital copy of the text, I just parse it with the Migaku Browser Extension and add every sentence that contains one or more unknown words (this is usually almost every sentence). Don't be afraid to split up the sentences later in Anki, there will be some loooonnngggg ones.

Reviews:

• 1 chapters before the current current chapter
• 3 chapters before the current current chapter
• 7 chapters before the current current chapter

If I studied #20 today, my first review would be 19, then 17, then 13. I don't do anything special for the reviews, just read while listening.

I find it takes about an hour to study the current chapter and review the previous chapters. Then, it takes about an hour to go through the Anki reviews in my HSK deck.

To prevent the reviews from becoming overwhelming I:

1. use Morphman to help sort them in a more comprehensible order
2. use Migaku vacation to prevent the cards due from being too high
3. limit new cards to 20 a day. Because of the nature of the sentences in the HSK book there will be multiple new vocabulary words in each sentence. This is tougher than the recommended i+1 sentences and it is why I also do vocabulary cards in Pleco.

This whole process can be pretty tedious and draining, but these 2 - 2.5 hours feel really productive

What about all the exercises and drills in textbooks?

Refold is about getting enough input that you internalize the language and grammar structures so that your output is pretty much automatic. Now in reality I don't think it's quite that smooth, that one day you just start speaking perfect Chinese. I think it does take a concerted effort to start outputting correctly.

The way I'm looking at this process is similar to how I look at learning Chinese Characters, delaying the output until you are comfortable with the input. Once I finish all the passages in the textbook I am planning on getting an iTalki tutor and going back and doing the exercises from the book. At this time I won't have to worry about remembering new vocabulary or topics. I'll know all this. And a lot of the grammar structures will be very familiar since I've encountered them so many times through reading and Anki. However, I may find that working with a tutor is all I need and the exercises are not a good use of time.