I was stuck in the "intermediate plateaux" for years.

Remembering new words and phrases was really hard, there was an overwhelming volume of new stuff to absorb, and no structure to help me remember it. I didn't use text books, and I was mostly self taught.

At that level, I needed to change how I learned new stuff to progress further.

So I tried lots of different ways to do it. Eventually, I found a framework which dramatically improved my ability to learn new Chinese vocabulary.

That framework is called: Language Chunking

“Chunking" is learning individual words and phrases together in bigger groups.

Three types of chunking can help dramatically improve how intermediate Chinese language students learn new Chinese vocabulary:

1. Word chunks: Put similar words into chunks like "idioms", "useful words", "three-character phrases", or "colloquial phrases".

2. Sentence chunks: Don't learn words and phrases in isolation. You have to learn and memorise it "in situ" within a chunk of real language.

3. Theme chunks: Chunk words and phrases based on similar themes: emotions, truth, crime, competition, failure, success, and so on.

Through chunking you'll improve how you learn new Chinese vocabulary by: Organising new words more efficiently, seeing them in context, and linking to other similar words and phrases.