posted by david.garcia.face on October 6, 2015 | 5 comments
I just started out with this website and overall it feels great! I have almost no notions of chinese whatsoever, and I'm starting out with the 'Absolute beginner' lessons.

I do have some knowledge of chinese characters from my experience with japanese, so I don't have much trouble learning the characters from each lesson.

What I would like to ask is just how many lessons would be OK to study each week? I went through three lessons today, all of them quite easy grammatically. I was planning on studying these three lessons over and over this week, to memorize both the concepts and the characters, but maybe I could take on a little more.

Would this be advisable, or should I take it slow? In average, how many lessons do you go through each week?
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trevelyan on October 6, 2015 | reply
We actually suggest speeding up. The best general strategy is to maximize your exposure to Chinese, and ramp up the difficulty level as your competence grows.

Trust your brain to be able to pick up the common words and patterns. By the time you've gone through 100 to 200 lessons at the absolute beginner level, you should be able to start mixing in elementary lessons and competence will snowball.

david.garcia.face on October 6, 2015 | reply
Thanks for the reply, I'll speed things up. One question, though. At first, when the pop quizzes showed up before a lesson, it only contained words from lessons I had already studied. But now it's showing words I've never seen before. I did visit a story lesson, but I didn't click on any words or marked it as studied.

When I checked my review plan, It only showed words from the lessons I studied. Where are this other words coming from?
trevelyan on October 6, 2015 | reply
It either means they've clambed onto your vocabulary list by accident (http://popupchinese.com/vocabulary) or - more likely - that the spaced repetition algorithm isn't finding anything you *need* to review and is throwing some new words your way instead of breaking the review cycle for your existing vocab.
david.garcia.face on October 7, 2015 | reply
Thank you for the reply. I wasn't aware that it mixed in new words when the other ones where already reviewed. That must've been it.