I’m just about to finish HSK3, and I’ve been doing the red courses. I understand the red courses are newer, but also starting with HSK4 the red courses give you the chinese character rather than the pinyin. My question is has anyone tried both and found one better than the other? I’ve grown accustomed to going through the words twice, once with pin yin and once with english. My biggest concern is it will be harder to learn them without the second round through. Any thoughts?
Personally, I’d recommend the blue courses, as I think it’s important to be tested on the tones.
However, I think you might want to consider going through the blue HSK 4 course and then quickly going through the red HSK 4 course. In theory, this would give you even more practice, and I think it might also help your speaking ability. Personally, I’ve found that if I just learn the pinyin and the English meaning of a Chinese word, then I can read the characters, but sometimes when I’m speaking, I can’t think of how to say the English word in Chinese, because I haven’t really practiced translating the word from English to Chinese, even though I’ve practiced going from Chinese to English.
I went through the blue, and realized how it is not as good as the red. This is because the blue may test you on the pinyin, but it will essentially be testing you on your ability to recall tones for single characters. Not to produce the words from English. Personally, I believe that going from English --> Chinese is harder and more useful in the long run. Obviously, with both approaches you should be tested from Chinese --> English. Because this is, in my view, the most useful testing direction flashcards on single words can provide you.
If you are listening to Chinese and are practicing dictation (like, writing in pinyin what the text is saying without subtitles), you will not be able to recognize words you have already learned if you use the Blue course. Because it doesn’t force you to link the two character pinyin to the definition. If you use the red course and FORCE YOURSELF to not use pinyin shortcuts such as typing in “sj” for 睡觉 or something like that. The red course is much better because it helps your writing and listening (with additional outside practice).
The tones are useful to know of course, but too much emphasis on memorizing tones can stifle us learners from ever speaking. I make plenty of tone mistakes when I practice speaking, but native speakers can still understand you if your grammar is correct and you speak quickly. Just my two cents.
Long story short: I think it’s more efficient to learn tones in the context of whole sentences. Go red.
Those are some really good points, some I hadn’t considered. I appreciate the feedback.
By the way, I should have mentioned that I don’t really remember too much about the details of the blue and red HSK 4 courses. I’m currently working my way through two HSK 6 courses, one that goes Chinese->English and Chinese->Pinyin, and a different one that goes English->Chinese, and I think this works well. However, these two courses have the words in the same order, so I can work on both of the courses at the same time and be practicing pretty much the same words in both courses.