The featured decks in Skritter appear to be pretty good. Has anyone used any particular deck that helped?
Just browsing I noticed:
If you browse “words” you can come up with HSK and TOCFL decks that your typical HSK and TOCFL decks “miss” although the words are a high frequency/relevant word. So the decks are literally called “words that HSK missed” or words that TOCFL “missed”
Also, I noticed the decks for Chinese Breeze and Mandarin Companion - which are great - although they are not in Featured - but they are actionable - because most people are most likely going to buy one of these two series first to efficiently expedite their reading comprehension…at least per SkritterOlle.
Finally, I noticed one that actually had an incomplete youtube companion something like “Learing Chinese in 1000 mandarin words”…but the fact that it linked with youtube dialogues, would have been great had they done the entire 1000 words acted out in dialogues readily accessible in youtube.
My question is, has anyone found a deck that was particularly useful? Especially ones that link with audio - Chinese Breeze (although you have to buy the book, it differentiates itself in that it’s NOT a textbook (as well as Mandarin Companion)/the youtube one mentioned above.
I think maybe people would be able to recommend better decks for you if you specified what you’re looking for a bit more!
I think all decks in Skritter were useful for someone at some point (otherwise they wouldn’t be there), but it obviously differs a lot from student to student. You ask which decks are helpful, but helpful for learning what? Specifying your level would also make it easier to recommend decks!
I agree with SkritterOlle I’m am studying the Japanese N4 deck because I find it useful for studying for the N4. However many of the words don’t have sentences, many of the ones that do (created by other users not Skritter) have errors in them. On top of that I can count on one hand the number of sentences that had audio and so far non of them have pictures. But I would never say it isn’t useful in fact I would say it’s invaluable.
I think the movie frequency word list is a good example, that will be a good one to cross check as you get up there in words. HSK and TOCFL obviously aren’t pure frequency lists - so this one seems like it is pretty essential although user created and not featured. I think it is a good stand in for the Routledge 5,000 frequency dictionary.
A great list would be the Routledge 5,000 frequency dictionary - as it would save some time. I think it would be great if Skritter could do this frequency dictionary by parts of speech (as the index for this book has frequency words by parts of speech). Just so you can kind of get a sense of you not missing any particular key word in any program you are in. I think first and foremost I would be looking for something like this.
However, any other useful lists I would be interested in too - I never got this idea until eenmarco made his post so that was good. Also, anything you think should probably be in featured that isn’t because of its high quality, and adaptability over many different study programs. Anything that links to youtube. Anything with high quality mp3s. I think the Breeze and the Mandarin Companion ones meet this “must get” kind of criteria considering Mandarin Companion is the same individual behind the Grammar Wiki online. Breeze is even better because of the audio, but like SkritterOlle said in his review, Mandarin Companion is still better quality.
With that said, so far this movie list, especially because it appears to get around 5,000 vocab in - does anyone know of a good user made or company made frequency list - as far as “definitive list” that has around 5k - 10k vocab - save a lot of manual trouble (that might be TOCFL or HSK - don’t know enough about these lists)
Maybe this is what you meant, but the lists I created that focuses on missing HSK vocabulary does exactly that, i.e. add high frequency stuff from a movie subtitle corpus that is not in HSK. I wrote about that here in great detail:
Another problem with frequency lists is that they aren’t very useful for beginners if they are based on written sources, which almost all of them are. We are in fact working on a list that is meant to represent what is useful for students, basing it off frequency lists, test lists, textbooks and graded readers. We will of course turn that into official lists, but they require some work before they are ready. So far, I have only spent significant time thinking about the top 300 or so. After most of the work on the character course we’re working on is done, I might have time to look more at creating such lists.
(that might be TOCFL or HSK - don’t know enough about these lists)