Hey, I started learning Mandarin two days ago using the Marilyn Method. I’m wondering how many words I can learn per day without overloading myself, to the point where the stories start blending together. Also, when you’re learning new words, how do you usually chunk them?
Right now I’m doing 30 words a day, in batches of 10, reviewing each batch right after I learn it to make sure it sticks. So far it has worked every time.
The number of new words you’ll be able to keep up with long term can vary a lot.
Just to give a general idea, anki’s spaced repetition system says you need to do 100 reviews if you want to add 10 new cards. So with 30 you’d be at 300 reviews a day. It’s up to you to know if it’s sustainable long term.
I think you can do as much as you want. It also depends on whether you’re going for pinyin only (which I highly recommend against) or pinyin + characters.
I tested both, and I was doing about 50–60 words per hour with pinyin only using the Marilyn Method, around 30-40 with pinyin + characters (though with lower retention), and about 15-20 per hour when spending half an hour memorizing new words and the other half drilling them by using them in sentences and reading AI-generated stories with the vocab I’d just learned. (by the way these numbers include anki reviews, so if it were pure memorization would be faster)
That said, I still believe I can double this pace since my system isn’t very fluent yet. Sometimes it takes me 10 seconds just to recall the person or location.
But I think you’d be fine even going for 200–300 words a day. Of course, you’ll have lower retention, but Anki will catch the ones that slip through anyway. With proper palace technique the stories are unlikely blend unless you reuse loci and get a “ghost image”)