I noticed the odd way that online language learning experts called for CI but rarely talked about how to get there with only side comments on graded content. Especially the ones that profess no formal study or flash card use is needed to gain a foothold. There being a dialectic is probably the best way to think about this. CI seems like it’s good in principle, but it would be useless if you can’t find perfectly targeted content (which is hard to do before having a strong understanding). Incredibly put together post!

I’m still in the early stages for my own journey and am working primarily on gaining the vocab and grammar (reading the hanzi because I was being overly reliant on pinyin). I really need to work more on listening. I tried a tone listening test and failed spectacularly, and I thought I was doing ok.

Anki is great, but it’s usefulness is limited. It’s great for cramming words into the brain in a way that sticks well (hanzi, basic meaning, pronunciation, tone) but it’s terrible at learning context without a lot of other work (sentence mining is apparently good, but similar to CI needs significant prior understanding of the language, and it’s not trivial to undertake the work). I’ve found some really great decks to provide variety to the study, but Ive found having too many decks becomes daunting and stressful.