Combining SRS With Reading and Conversation

The simplest workable arrangement is this: spend most of your study time on reading, listening and talking, and use spaced repetition to keep the words you meet from fading. Add a small, fixed number of new cards from your reading each day, and cap it. The cap matters more than the method, because the usual failure is mining too much and then drowning in reviews.

This article gives an example weekly split for an adult with limited hours, and a practical way to choose which words to turn into cards.

Why the two need each other

Spaced repetition is good at one thing: bringing back a word just before you would forget it. It is poor at teaching you how a word behaves in use, and it cannot give you listening speed or conversational ease. Reading and conversation do the reverse. They show you words in context and build fluency, but without review, many of the words you meet once never return in time to stay.

Combined, the loop is simple. You meet a word in something you are reading or hearing. If it is worth keeping, you make a card. The scheduler brings it back. When you meet it again in reading, the card gets reinforced by real use. Our article on spaced repetition for Chinese explains the review side.

A weekly split for an adult

These are example shares for around five to seven hours a week. Adjust them to your time.

Activity	Share of study time	Notes
Reviews (SRS)	About a fifth	Short daily sessions, never skipped for more than a day or two
Textbook or new material	About a quarter	Dangdai lessons or your course
Reading	About a quarter	Graded readers first, then Taiwanese media
Listening and speaking	The remainder (about 30%)	Shows or podcasts at a level you mostly follow, plus one regular tutor or partner slot a week

The point of the table is the proportion. If reviews are consuming most of your hours, your daily new-card count is too high.

Where to find reading that suits an SRS habit

For readings written in Traditional characters, see our guide to Traditional Chinese graded readers. Graded material keeps the unknown-word rate low, so each text yields a handful of candidates rather than dozens.

Once you are past the beginner stage, Taiwanese shows, podcasts and articles become practical. The guide to Taiwanese Mandarin media for intermediate learners lists options. Media in Taiwan Mandarin also gives you the vocabulary and pronunciation you will hear locally.

Which words to turn into cards

Not every unknown word deserves a card. Use a filter.

1. Did you meet it more than once? A word you see in two different places is a better candidate than one you saw once.
2. Is it useful to you? A word about your job, your family or your daily life beats a rare literary word.
3. Can you guess it from context and from characters you know? If so, you may not need a card at all.
4. Is it one word, not a whole phrase? Prefer single words with a short example. Our piece on sentence cards and word cards covers when a sentence is worth the extra cost.

A worked example

Suppose a graded reader or a Taiwanese show gives you this line: 我今天坐捷運去超商買咖啡。 (Wǒ jīntiān zuò jiéyùn qù chāoshāng mǎi kāfēi. “Today I took the MRT to the convenience store to buy coffee.”)

Suppose you already know 今天, 買 and 咖啡 but not 捷運 (jiéyùn, the MRT) or 超商 (chāoshāng, convenience store, short for 便利商店). Run the filter. Both are everyday Taiwan words you will meet again and need, so both pass questions 1 and 2. Neither can be guessed from the characters, so you make cards. Keep them as plain word cards, with this sentence as the example on the back. Skip 坐 if you half know it from context, and skip a rare word you saw only once.

When you read, mark the word and keep going. Make cards in a separate session afterwards. Looking up every word in the middle of a text breaks your reading and can make it feel like work.

Keeping the queue under control

Mining feeds the queue, and the queue is what you pay for later.

• Set a daily new-card cap and keep it, even on days you found twenty good words. Put the extras on a “later” list.
• Make cards after reading, in a batch. Five minutes is enough.
• Delete cards you do not want. If a word turns out to be rare or irrelevant, remove it. A deck is not a record of everything you read.
• Pause new cards when reviews pile up. Clear the backlog before adding more. Anki’s FSRS scheduler (built in since version 23.10) helps, but it cannot change how many cards you add.

The Anki configuration guide covers the settings that control daily limits.

Reading and cards: two modes

It helps to separate two ways of reading. In extensive reading you read a lot, tolerate unknown words and keep going. In intensive reading you read a short text closely and look up everything. Cards usually come from the intensive mode, or from a quick pass after extensive reading. The article on extensive and intensive reading in Chinese describes when each is useful.

Conversation counts too

Words from conversation are the best candidates of all, because you needed them. When a tutor or a language partner gives you a word you were missing, write it down while the moment is fresh, and add it later. A word you needed and lacked already has a reason attached to it, which a word picked from a list does not.

Where Zhong fits

Zhong combines FSRS reviews with graded reading in one app, which means review and reading can sit in one place. If you use separate tools, the same weekly proportions apply.

Related reading

• Does spaced repetition work for Chinese?
• Traditional Chinese graded readers
• Taiwanese Mandarin media for intermediate learners
• Extensive vs intensive reading in Chinese