Parallel Streams
Along the way, I've had rather interesting "discoveries", making the process even more satisfying for me. You see, my learning Chinese has gone along three distinct streams:
1. Podcasts (mainly ChinesePod, but also Popup Chinese) - where I learned how words & sentences sounded (based around pinyin);
2. Flashcards (using Anki) - where I would learn vocab and sentence structure. Initially it was built around pinyin, but over time I learned some characters this way too;
3. Heisig (here are the articles I have written on the subject) - which was all about learning characters, but focusing on the meaning and not the pronunciation.
Podcasts, for example, aren't great for learning to read; and Heisig wasn't intended for learning how to pronounce the characters. But over time, although I have focused on these streams separately, these various methods have overlapped, and things clicked into place.
So Clever
For example, the first such discovery I remember from years ago was the word for 'clever' - cōngming (聪明). By that stage I had only learned the word through audio podcasts, and actually thought it was cóngming (从明) - I guess because 'clever' and 'from brightness' made sense. Even though it turns out I was very wrong!
Red cars
When you buy a red car, afterwards it seems that every car you see is a red car. And similarly when you learn new characters, it seems that every character you see is that new one.
On my recent re-do of 'Book 1', I learned 落 (luò), which has the Heisig-keyword 'fall'. I vaguely remember learning it the first time, but I was sure that I had NOT seen it in the last couple of years since learning it.
And then another red car came past. Just a few days later, the following sentence popped up on my flashcard revision ...
We are studying the decline of ancient Rome
wǒmenzài yánjiūgǔLuómǎde shuāiluò
我们在研究古罗马的衰落
I actually remembered having done this sentence a few times before, and there it was ... 落. I had learned this character and I had used this character. But I most certainly did not remember that character!
And a couple of weeks later, another old sentence arrived in the queue for learning ...
What’s a pretty girl like you doing here all alone?
xiàng nǐ zhèyàng de měinǚ zěnme huì luòdān?
像你这样的美女怎么会落单？
That sneaky character again! It's everywhere.
Bringing it all together
I have always used different methods for whatever they each do best. And I have not forced myself to integrate these methods. Somehow with zero additional effort, things just connect themselves - something I've learned one way seems to fill a hole in what I have learned anther way. I don't force anything, which allows me to enjoy every moment of learning - nothing is contrived, nothing is done based purely on obligation.
And along the way, I just stare at all these nice red cars as they go past ...
iGoogle collection of "Learn Chinese" feeds
