I thought this blog post was pretty great. I modified the SRS scoring to match Refold SRS. I’ve been going at 15 cards per day, learned threshold at 200 and it’s been pretty manageable.

Here are my tweaked scoring parameters for Pleco SRS: EASINESS CHANGE Incorrect -10 Correct 4 Tweak Parameters INITIAL CORRECT SCORE Correct 100 CORRECT SCALE SCORE INCREASE % Correct 100 INCORRECT SCORE DECREASE % Incorrect 50 SCORE LIMITS Minimum score 100 Maximum score 3650000 EASINESS Minimum easiness 50 Maximum easiness 200 Easiness divisor 40 Cushion new cards Yes

I think Pleco SRS is just one piece though. It’s a good way to expand the frontier of your knowledge, but bad at making sure you actually know the stuff you’re supposed to know really well. Furthermore, it can be hard to decide what definition for a word you should go with because the meanings are numerous and often don’t line up well with english semantics. For example, you’ll learn that 喂 is what people say to answer the phone or get your attention. But later you’ll learn this also means to feed, like feed your dog.

As a result, in my opinion, I think the real core of learning the language is reading a ton of Chinese that you can understand at least 90% but less than 100% of, preferably with audio. Listening is nice too but I think because Chinese has so many homophones, it’s hard to understand a lot of what people are saying until higher levels, and speech is synchronous, so it’s harder to scrub through and re-hear a sentence vs re-reading a sentence.

How much is a ton? This site has some answers. although it’s from english, the analogy is about the same for chinese, assuming about 1.6 characters per word. For CEFR C1 fluency you want to aim for something like >=10 exposures to the most common 10k words. That’s 6.3 million words. The Harry Potter series is ~1.0 million words for all 7 books. It’s a lot, but it’s doable. You can see the number of words per book gradually ramps up, and you’re only tasked with a book a week.

At typical reading speeds, if you spend somewhere between 30 minutes - 90 minutes a day reading Chinese, you’ll achieve a high level of fluency in a few years. Of course reading isn’t the only aspect of fluency but it’s the most important in the sense that it allows your internalized vocabulary to expand which is a hard ceiling on all your other skills in the language. DuChinese, Pleco graded readers, and Linq are good sites for this purpose, but they are paid. heavenly path is a free community resource but the content is higher level.

Best of luck 同志 I can elaborate or add to this if you have questions.

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