Trying to come up with a Chinese learning routine for myself has been hard. My method so far has been: Will learn when I feel like it, which as you know, tends to get derailed quickly when life gets busy or hard. February was like that for me, with work becoming so busy that by the end of the working day I become way too tired to learn/revise my Chinese characters as usual.

Routines are my kryptonite. My brain rebels at them because it thinks they’re boring and on top of that I keep forgetting the details of said routine. (So that’s why I’m writing this post, to help me remember and also help me stay accountable because I’m announcing to the whole freaking world I’m doing this.)

That said, routines have been an absolute life saver for me in life. For example, in 2022, I started aiming to walk at least 5,000 steps a day. My problem has always been consistency, so having a low number felt more doable to me. Once I conquered 5000 steps, I increased it to 6000 and so on. In 2024, I now walk 7000-10000 steps a day. So, I know they work.

Determining how or what my Chinese learning routine has been more difficult.

As a “heritage” speaker, meaning, someone who has some foundation in Mandarin, I have to learn Mandarin differently from second language learners.

For example, I find the mnemonic systems by some language learning systems far too complex for me as I already know some of the words, which includes the meaning, how to use them, the tones. I just don’t know how to read the characters.

However, there are some words that are unfamiliar so I have to employ second-language-learner techniques for these words.

Having such a hybrid or mixed learning system increases the complexity of my routine.

Yesterday, I spent an hour reading the Outlier Linguistics’ Pipeline Strategy and it made my head spin a little. I know it’ll be far too complicated for my brain to follow, though I understand the logic behind it. The teachers of the course meant for second language learners to use this technique, so I understand why this technique will work.

However, on top of that, I know, just know, that learning 3-5 characters a day on a working day is nigh impossible for me. I need a day free of work distractions to learn something new, so I decided to only use weekends to learn new characters and weekdays to revise these new words.

Changing Goals

I have decided to throw away the HSK mastery goals. (Originally, I wanted to reach HSK 4 level by end of the year.) Now, I’m using this Chinese frequency list instead:

• Wikipedia 1000 most commonly used Chinese characters
• Leiden Weibo Corpus – which lists the most commonly used Chinese Characters on Weibo.

The goal is to master 1000 most commonly used Chinese characters by the end of 2024. So far, I’m at 130 characters — my progress significantly slowed in February due to work being busier.

Mastering 1,000 Chinese characters – learning routine v1

This is what I hope is my extremely simple Chinese learning routine:

Weekend, 10am: Learn a total of 20 new characters by:

• Understanding the components of each character
• Creating mnemonics for each
• Adding the characters to the Tofu Learn app
• Use the Anki deck I downloaded (maybe an extra step too many. Will evaluate but I really like the deck!)

Weekdays: Revise and remember the 20 characters by:

• Using Tofu learn flashcards – 10 minutes a day during lunch time
• Using the characters by writing them in a sentence in my diary. (Context learning) – end of day

Comprehensive input practice:

• Watch Chinese dramas daily (really not a problem for me. It doesn’t feel like work at all haha)
• Mondays (will increase frequency once I remember to be more consistent with this routine): Listening to Chinesepod Elementary & Intermediate, and writing down new words, and entering them in my flashcards.

So, language learners, what do you think? Would love to know more about your routine so that I can get more ideas/inspiration/motivation for my own routine.