Spaced Repetition for Chinese: Making It Stick

You have almost certainly experienced this. You study a list of 词 (cí, words) hard on Sunday, feel confident, and by Thursday half of them are gone. The studying was real. The method was the problem. Massed cramming lights up short-term memory and then leaks like a sieve.

Spaced repetition (SRS) is the fix, and it is not a trick or an app gimmick. It is built on a well-documented feature of human memory: we remember things longer when we review them at increasing intervals, ideally right before we would have forgotten them.

For Chinese, with its thousands of characters and tones, this is the single most efficient way to build vocabulary that lasts. Here is how to use it properly.

Why cramming fails and spacing wins

When you review a word five times in one sitting, each repetition does almost nothing, because the word is still fresh in your mind. You are practicing recognition, not retrieval from a cold start.