Chinese characters and words that refuse to stick: Killing leeches

How long does it take to learn a Chinese character or word?
It varies. Some vocabulary just refuses to stick, no matter what you do.

These are called leeches, and if you don’t deal with them, they’ll suck you dry.

The problem is that these leeches can go undetected, and if you have a large flashcard deck, they can take up a disproportionate amount of time you could have used for something more productive.

Leeches are not only a problem for students using flashcards, of course. If you keep forgetting what a character means when reading, for example, you will waste an inordinate amount of time looking it up over and over.

In this article, we will look at how to deal with tricky Chinese vocabulary that just refuses to stick.

Tune in to the Hacking Chinese Podcast to listen to the related episode (#280).

Available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube and many other platforms!

Leeches: Vocabulary that you keep forgetting over and over

All students have had experiences with such characters or words, although not everybody uses the word “leech”.

What turns a vocabulary item into a leech varies and is highly individual. Fortunately, we don’t need to know exactly why a leech appears; we simply need to know how to recognise it and how to deal with it.

Leeches are harmless on their own, but deadly in packs

Before we look at how to kill leeches, let’s examine the rationale for taking them seriously. Forgetting the occasional character or word doesn’t seem so bad, right?

Based on my own numbers, leeches can take on average ten times as many repetitions to learn compared to other items, and the end result is still that you haven’t really learnt them.

This means that when you have dozens or even hundreds of them, they will waste a lot of time you could have used to learn something else.

It’s not only a matter of time and opportunity cost; however, it’s also about motivation and frustration. Few things related to learning Chinese annoy me more than forgetting how to write the same character for the fiftieth time.

The problem with leeches is tricky. Unless you have investigated, you probably waste more time and energy on them than you think.

How to spot leeches

Spotting leeches might seem like an easy task; if they’re so frustrating, wouldn’t you notice them without even trying to?

Sometimes yes, especially in extreme cases. This is especially true if you forget the same character or word many times in a row.

However, I consider myself fairly observant of my own study behaviour, and when I checked leeches after using Anki for a while, I was shocked by how many repetitions I had for some characters and words.

Some items had almost 100 reviews, which is a ridiculously high number (the worst offender last time I counted was 昏; no, I really don’t know why).

The reason some leeches are hard to spot is that you do get a few reviews right, you kind of sort of do know the character or word, but then they slip away.

If you failed the same flashcard eight times in a row, you’d notice, but if you get it right five times between each lapse, with weeks or months in between, you probably won’t notice.

Leeches in Anki and other spaced repetition software

If you are using Anki too, or another flashcard app with spaced repetition that shows you how many times you’ve reviewed a card and how many of those were correct, you can just check your leech status right now.

Spaced repetition software and why you should use it

Naturally, there’s no universally agreed threshold for when a flashcard becomes a leech, but the default number of lapses to trigger a leech in Anki is 8.

Note that a lapse here indicates when you forget something in review mode, as opposed to something you’ve just learnt or just forgot (struggling to learn something new or forgetting the same item eight times in a row does not trigger it).

Anki will then automatically suspend leeches, and you need to deal with them and manually unsuspend them. This is a great feature that all apps should have!

Other apps, like Skritter, don’t have explicit leech handling, so you can’t set a threshold and show a leech report, but you can still find characters that have abnormally many reviews.

The exact definition is not set in stone, and I encourage you to come up with your own if your study setup or spaced repetition app allows you to configure a leech threshold.

Tracing vocabulary errors in Chinese can be hard

Sometimes, what constitutes a leech is more complex than a single character or word. What if there are characters you mix up, so the errors are spread over two items instead of one?

Dealing with Chinese characters you keep mixing up

Or what if you’re a bit too lenient on yourself (also known as cheating, if you want to be more direct about it)?

There’s no easy fix for this, but being mindful that there is such a thing as leeches and that they can drain energy and waste time is a good start.

Dealing with tricky vocabulary in Chinese: Kill the leeches!

Now that you have identified a leech, what do you do with it?

It depends on what kind of leech it is, so it’s time to revisit what I said about the factors creating a leech being varied and highly individual.

• Weak understanding: Most leeches are the result of poor routines for learning new characters, especially if you rely on flashcards. Did you just throw the flashcard into the deck and start reviewing it directly? That sometimes works, but it’s better to spend some time getting to know the character properly before you start reviewing it. You’re supposed to review things you already know, not completely new information. This can come back and bite you later, in the form of a leech. Learn more about the character or word. Is it a compound? What are its constituent parts?
• Bad mnemonics: If you’re using mnemonics to learn characters, it could be that you’re not doing it right, or at least that this particular mnemonic didn’t work for this particular vocabulary item. Using mnemonics is a long learning process, and feedback like this is essential to developing your strategy. Rework the mnemonic and, if possible, note why it might have failed.
• Confusing similar characters: I mentioned this above, but mixing up or otherwise confusing characters or parts of characters is extremely common. Tracing your errors to the source, or trying to figure out why you got something wrong, is a good start. I did this with seven errors I made in this article to show you how it can be done: 7 mistakes I made when writing Chinese characters and what I learnt from them

7 mistakes I made when writing Chinese characters and what I learnt from them

There are more reasons you might struggle to remember certain characters or words in Chinese, but I think those cover the most common cases.

Take decisive action against leeches; they won’t go away on their own

The most important thing isn’t exactly how you deal with leeches, but that you do indeed deal with them.

Most leeches are easy to deal with.

Once you have spotted them, you look at the character or word thoroughly, make sure you understand how it works, create a good mnemonic and make sure you’re not mixing it up with other characters.

You don’t need to do this as soon as you track down a leech, since this might interrupt whatever else you’re doing. Instead, mark or take note of the vocabulary item in question and return to it later.

Maybe introduce a leech hunting Sunday in your study routine.

Ignoring leeches just wastes more time and drains more energy

The above approach works almost every time, but that assumes that you take decisive action.

The alternative, the lazy approach, is to ignore the leeches and just hammer away at the flashcards until you remember them.

The problem is that this doesn’t really work. The fact that there are leeches means that doing whatever you do for other characters or words simply won’t cut it.

Giving up is (sometimes) an option

Even though it becomes necessary to learn most characters and words at some point, and there probably is a reason why you have chosen to learn the specific vocabulary item that is now a leech, it’s important to realise that you don’t always have to fight.

Let’s say you have a leech you’ve tried to kill a few times but which simply refuses to stick, regardless of mnemonics or any other strategy you try.

In such a case, ask yourself: Do I really need this word? Is it common enough?

If the answer is “no”, just delete the flashcard and get rid of the leech that way. Spend the time thus saved learning something else. If the word later turns out to be important, you’ll run into it again.

In fact, this is something you should probably do more often than you do. Actively managing your vocabulary is important, and that includes pruning characters and words you don’t actually need or that are disproportionately expensive to learn in terms of time and energy invested.

I wrote more about this here: Cultivate your Chinese flashcard garden… or burn it down and start afresh

Cultivate your Chinese flashcard garden… or burn it down and start afresh

Leeches: Be aware of them, track them down and kill them

In any case, keep your eyes peeled for leeches. Take decisive action to get rid of them, once and for all.

A few leeches are irritating, but a throng of them will kill you. Don’t let them. Take control and make your studying even more effective.

Questions for the reader

• Were you aware of leeches before reading this article, even if you might not have called them that?
• What’s your approach for tracking and killing leeches, if you have one?
• What’s your worst leech? If you can check, how many failed reviews does it have?

Please let me know in the comments!