“The rabbit hole effect” is another aspect of
complementary memory
and defeat in detail. There is a lot of
overlap between these three concepts, but each offers its own insight into
effective language learning.
In Alice's Adventures in Wonderland,
Alice makes her entry into the other world through a rabbit hole. The term now
has a couple of general meanings in English. It can describe inadvertently
entering a chaotic or incomprehensible situation, which isn't what we're
interested in for learning Chinese (it also has one or two “extra” meanings
which I won't describe here). The other meaning is much more relevant: from a
simple start, finding yourself drawn into more and more discoveries that you
otherwise would have been oblivious of.
When you learn a new Chinese word, you don't have to stop there – you can use
approaches like sentence branching,
defeat in detail and so on to expand
from that starting point. The word is a rabbit hole, and you can follow it to
learn a wealth of further material. The rabbit hole doesn't have to be a word,
either. Any small item that you learn in Chinese can always lead you on to
learning a lot more.
To make a word or other item become a rabbit hole, you need some good resources.
A good Chinese dictionary is essential, and Chinese-Chinese dictionaries work
best for this as they will inevitably lead you on to looking up more words that
you find in the definitions (I like my physical copy of
现代汉语词典 for this). Banks of example
sentences are also great for rabbit holing, as are electronic dictionaries that
can show you related words or words using the same characters.
You also get a natural rabbit hole effect whenever you read or listen to
Chinese, which is yet another reason you should always aim to maximise the time
you spend reading and listening. Getting real Chinese input will always prompt
you to go on a journey of discovery into the language, and you can adapt it to
suit your time and energy levels.