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eskandar
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Anki

Postby eskandar » 2017-10-24, 2:38

Someone recently suggested creating a separate thread for Anki-related discussion. I'll start us off with a technical question:

I used to have audio (MP3 files) attached to a good number of cards. At some point I realized I didn't need the audio anymore and manually went through and deleted the file attachments one by one. I used Tools>Check Media in the desktop version to try to clear these from my database, but I don't think it worked because AnkiWeb tells me I have 13.19MB of media stored in my account (out of a total disk usage of 22.32MB). The total disk usage also seems really high, even if none of the media got deleted, because I only have 6419 total cards and they only contain text. Any ideas? I guess none of this really matters other than I don't like the idea of my decks being unnecessarily clogged up (and unnecessarily using the Anki server's bandwidth).
Please correct my mistakes in any language.

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Re: Anki

Postby Luís » 2017-10-24, 9:25

You can try to see if there are some files left on your Anki media folder and in case there are, delete them manually.
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księżycowy

Re: Anki

Postby księżycowy » 2017-10-24, 13:25

Has anyone messed around with adding sound to their Anki cards? I believe that is possible, isn't it?

I wouldn't mind doing this for at least some of my sentences in my decks (if it's not too much work, that is). I have audio file editing software and all the audio files on my computer, so that wouldn't be much of a problem.

Well, except for the actual editing. :P

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Re: Anki

Postby Car » 2017-10-24, 14:36

I installed the AwesomeTTS extension and briefly toyed with it, but I think I don't really need it after all, but it definitely is nice to have and easy to do.

Speaking of extensions, I used the Improved Quizlet to Anki Importer extension to import the Quizlet decks they linked to in the Futurelearn courses I took part in. It works just fine, but you end up with lots of different decks and merging them takes some time.
Please correct my mistakes!

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Re: Anki

Postby Luís » 2017-10-24, 15:14

And if you don't want to use a TTS system, you can simply add audio files to a card (or record something yourself on the fly)
For Chinese I used a plugin (it was called Pinyin Toolkit, I think), which added sound automatically. It had other features as well, such as adding translations, dictionary definitions, stroke order, etc. I didn't use most of them, though.
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Re: Anki

Postby księżycowy » 2017-10-24, 15:49

I could find stroke order helpful for Japanese at the moment. Of course, most of the problem is that I'm not physically writing much Japanese at the moment.

eskandar
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Re: Anki

Postby eskandar » 2017-10-24, 16:32

Luís wrote:You can try to see if there are some files left on your Anki media folder and in case there are, delete them manually.

Thank you, that was really helpful! Turns out it wasn't leftover audio files after all; there was a large font (Jameel Noori Nastaleeq, which I use for Urdu cards) that I had forgotten about.

księżycowy wrote:Has anyone messed around with adding sound to their Anki cards? I believe that is possible, isn't it?

Yes...see the initial post in this thread. :whistle: I downloaded MP3s from forvo.com and easily attached them to cards. You could definitely use the audio you have.
Please correct my mistakes in any language.

księżycowy

Re: Anki

Postby księżycowy » 2017-10-24, 16:34

Oh, right. I did read your post, but must have forgotten some of it. It's been a distracting day today.

I'm thinking of dissecting the lesson audio from my textbooks and using that for sentences I've deemed worthy of adding to my Anki decks.

Certainly sounds like it should work. Just comes down to how much time it takes and how much of a pain in the ass it is.

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Re: Anki

Postby voron » 2017-10-25, 14:34

How do you guys deal with different stems for the same word, for example different past and present stems for verbs?
An example from English would be: go - went
Arabic: يروح - راح (to go)
Kurdish: çûn - diçe (to go)

I used to put them both in the same card, but this turned to be boring (especially for Arabic, since it's just a recombination of the same root letters), and I found I couldn't produce them correctly afterwards anyway. Now I put them in different cards, not necessarily in pairs -- rather, just the root I encounter in the text I study from.

Karavinka

Re: Anki

Postby Karavinka » 2017-10-25, 23:12

voron wrote:How do you guys deal with different stems for the same word, for example different past and present stems for verbs?
An example from English would be: go - went
Arabic: يروح - راح (to go)
Kurdish: çûn - diçe (to go)

I used to put them both in the same card, but this turned to be boring (especially for Arabic, since it's just a recombination of the same root letters), and I found I couldn't produce them correctly afterwards anyway. Now I put them in different cards, not necessarily in pairs -- rather, just the root I encounter in the text I study from.


I would keep them separate, and add two sentences that contain each form. Say, Ainu has "an" and "okay" as singular and plural forms of "there is, there exists." I don't need to know that; I only need to know they both express the existence of something. Once I see enough sentences that contain them many enough times, I'll start seeing the pattern of their complimentary distribution.

------

About the goddamn Sinoglyphs.

First, stroke order. While this is helpful when you're starting out, I wouldn't recommend adding that to the deck every time. It's going to be a clutter you'll want to ignore sooner or later. I don't bother looking up the stroke order of every goddamn character, once you get a feel for it then do whatever you want. You are not going to be tested on the stroke order unless you're learning calligraphy (or your teacher is a maniac), and the stroke orders are not even universal.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stroke_order

It turns out that the order I use to write 必 is ROC/Hong Kong but 問 is Traditional.


My Kanji deck now contains mostly proper nouns with irregular readings, not only of Japanese things but of Korean and Chinese names as well. Look at this mess:

高麗神社 komajinja (a shrine in Japan)
高麗人参 kouraininjin (Korean ginseng)
高麗 kourai (a Korean Dynasty)
高句麗 koukuri (a Korean Dynasty)

As seen above, it's unpredictable. Instead of having 麗 as "rei; uruwashii; urumi; ri, rai, ma," as one card which is but a confusing mess, I'd rather keep the compounds of the rare readings so I simply recognize them as Gestalt. These are four independent cards in my Anki. (Actually 3; I somehow just know 高麗人参.)


I still keep a pure character deck for Hanzi. I don't really use a plugin, I thought about it but I can't know when I need to double check and modify the contents. Like this: the following are the variant forms of "to fight" / dou4.

鬪 : Traditional-Korean and Japanese
鬥 : Traditional-Taiwan (which I personally regard as "simplified" but that aside)
斗 : Simplified-Mainland

I normally don't add Simplified forms of the same characters unless that Simplified letterform is also found in otherwise "Traditional" writing as a variant form.

So, I register 鬥 and 鬪 separately as variant forms of each other, as two cards. The problem is 斗; this is an independent character dou3 that is a unit of measure used in ancient China, but got merged to 鬥 in Simplified to mean "fight" now. At first I treated it as a separate character (as dou3).

But this got confusing - as my Modern Mandarin sentences in another deck are all in Simplified - that I had to manually edit it as "dou4, dou3" with extra notes.

Since I color-code different types of Chinese in my sentence deck - Modern Mandarin is red and Classical Chinese is black - if I see 斗 in red in Anki, that's dou4, and if it's black, it's dou3. For now, that's enough; I'll get used to it enough that I will one day forget there even was an irregularity in the first place.

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Re: Anki

Postby eskandar » 2017-10-26, 20:35

voron wrote:How do you guys deal with different stems for the same word, for example different past and present stems for verbs?
An example from English would be: go - went
Arabic: يروح - راح (to go)
Kurdish: çûn - diçe (to go)

I used to put them both in the same card, but this turned to be boring (especially for Arabic, since it's just a recombination of the same root letters), and I found I couldn't produce them correctly afterwards anyway. Now I put them in different cards, not necessarily in pairs -- rather, just the root I encounter in the text I study from.

Most of my Arabic cards for verbs use the following format:
(front) ذهب
(back) ذَهَبَ - يَذهَب - الذَهاب
dhahaba - yadhhabu - al-dhahaab
to go

That is, the front contains the 3rd person masculine past tense, without vocalization, and the back contains the same (vocalized) along with the present tense conjugation, the verbal noun, and sometimes the 1st person past tense if it's less predictable (eg. كاد - يكاد and كِدتُ). When reviewing the card, I say out loud the conjugations (past, present, and verbal noun) as well as the English definition before I reveal the back to check my answers. It's a little tedious but I find it effective. Maybe your approach and/or Karavinka's is better, I'm not sure. I think there are advantages to both. Having words in sentences rather than contextless vocabulary is definitely great in that you review multiple things at a time, you memorize how to use the word rather than just its meaning, etc. But the downside, IMO, is that it's much easier to guess a word's meaning from context than to know it cold, without context.
Please correct my mistakes in any language.

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Re: Anki

Postby vijayjohn » 2017-10-26, 21:11

I may not use Anki, but I kind of use both approaches myself. Sometimes, I also end up having similar or related expressions grouped together. Here's an example from Micmac (God how I hate this English name for that language), an Algonquian language mainly spoken in Eastern Canada:
I see the woman. = Nmi'k epit.
I see the table. = Nmitu ptauti.
little knife = waqnji'j, which also means sandy area between two adjacent ponds
crooked knife = awa'qi'kn/waqa'qanikin

So in each of those last two examples, I quiz myself over two things in the same line instead of just one, whereas in the first two lines, I'm basically quizzing myself over the same paradigm ('I see [animate direct object]' vs. 'I see [inanimate direct object]').

księżycowy

Re: Anki

Postby księżycowy » 2017-10-28, 11:39

So, I'm finally getting around to adding sentences and grammar to my Anki decks, but I'm curious, how many sentences of one particular sentence type should I have?

For example, the sentence type [subject + noun + def art + gen noun (+adjective)] which shows a genitive relationship in Irish. Tá capall an tagairt bacach "the priest's horse is lame" (lit. "Is [the] horse the priest-genitive lame") Should I have a few sentences if this type, or just one? I have a feeling that most of you would say sentence it up for all sentence types, but I'm just curious how everyone else does it.

Also, I have a technical question. So, I've inserted an audio file for my first card. As far as I can tell I've placed in on my "front", which has the Irish. It plays as expected, only once when I first see the Irish. However, once I go to the reverse card, it plays on the English side immediately and then again, once I click for the answer. How do I get it to stop playing when the English first shows up?

Karavinka

Re: Anki

Postby Karavinka » 2017-10-28, 16:59

księżycowy wrote:So, I'm finally getting around to adding sentences and grammar to my Anki decks, but I'm curious, how many sentences of one particular sentence type should I have?

For example, the sentence type [subject + noun + def art + gen noun (+adjective)] which shows a genitive relationship in Irish. Tá capall an tagairt bacach "the priest's horse is lame" (lit. "Is [the] horse the priest-genitive lame") Should I have a few sentences if this type, or just one? I have a feeling that most of you would say sentence it up for all sentence types, but I'm just curious how everyone else does it.

Also, I have a technical question. So, I've inserted an audio file for my first card. As far as I can tell I've placed in on my "front", which has the Irish. It plays as expected, only once when I first see the Irish. However, once I go to the reverse card, it plays on the English side immediately and then again, once I click for the answer. How do I get it to stop playing when the English first shows up?


I don't really consider sentence type when I decide whether I put it in Anki or not.

If it contains a word I'd like to learn, I'll add it.
If it says something in an interesting way, I'll add it.
Otherwise, I won't bother with it.

And if it's an artificially crafted sentence for the learners, and is not mined from a native media, I probably won't bother with it.

My modus operandi is random fire. Just adding tons of sentences will statistically guarantee that it will cover all the core vocabulary and grammar forms, eventually. (And because of this, Anki is only half of the story; crashing into the native media to mine the sentences, that's the other half)

I can't answer the technical part of the question because I never go from known language to the target language.

księżycowy

Re: Anki

Postby księżycowy » 2017-10-28, 22:31

Just to be clear, I'm not using that as the only criteria in selecting which sentences I put into Anki.

But that was very helpful. Thanks yet again Karavinka!

I also believe I figured out my technical issue. I just added a field for it. Makes it much easier to manipulate. :P

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Re: Anki

Postby Bubulus » 2017-10-31, 16:23

So, it's been two weeks since I started using Anki and I seem not to hate it yet. Good. I've also taken Karavinka's advice of preferring to enter sentences rather than individual vocabulary items. I'm not using 100% native sentences found in the wild though, as I'm taking or adapting examples from textbooks too for Standard Arabic. That language is not anybody's true mother tongue anyway.

Also, I've always liked to use my own Arabic romanization since all the common ones as well as the ISO one (ISO 233) have issues, especially in terms of how easy they are to type. However, I've now had to change it again, since I often find myself entering data on my Android phone and I can't type in my old romanization using Gboard (Google's keyboard layout for Android), and I've made some odd choices. I don't think I'm ever going to be asked to share my deck, but I hope that if I ever do, the other person or people won't get mad for me using p for ث, v for ذ, c for ع and g for غ (and -aa[t for ـاة).

    sa-tusaacidu-ka haavaa caläa lHuSuul caläa lmacluumaat
    This will help you access the information

(In practice I just write "hva" and "cla" since these words are so common.)

c for ع is not so bad, as it looks kind of like ʿ which is used in many romanization schemes, but I do wish I could enter Þ and ð for ث and ذ instead. Þ and ð are Latin-1 Supplement characters! That is, they're very basic characters, and should really be available in the tooltip of the T and D keys.

And no, using vowel diacritics is not really an option as they're annoying to enter on Gboard too, even though it's possible to enter them, since they're crammed into a single key.

księżycowy

Re: Anki

Postby księżycowy » 2017-10-31, 20:07

Yeah, I'm going to be putting textbook sentences in my Anki decks too. I agree with the long term idea of adding native material, and at some point it should surely transition to mostly, if not exclusively, native material. But I'mma stick with mostly textbook stuff for now, mixed with bits of the stories I've been translating (i.e. native materials).

księżycowy

Re: Anki

Postby księżycowy » 2017-11-04, 18:34

I'm curious, which do you guys favor: new or review cards?

I've always had it set to where I'm learning new vocabulary more than I'm reviewing, but I feel almost like I should be reviewing more then learning. Or maybe they should more equal? Idk. What do you guys do for that? And how many cards of both types (new and review) do you typically do in a day for one language?

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Re: Anki

Postby vijayjohn » 2017-11-04, 19:32

I'm all for reviewing stuff, honestly. (Dunno how that works in Anki though). Although maybe practicing languages with native speakers is the best way to do that.

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Re: Anki

Postby Luís » 2017-11-04, 19:44

I limit my new cards (10-20 words per day, depending on the language), so it's mostly review.

Another important question: recognition or recall? :P
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