Trying out MCD's with audio.

[sevitzky]

Alright kids! I'm really excited about a new type of Anki card that I'm trying out. As you might expect, there is nobody I can really share this excitement with, except a forum like this.

I have an authentic arabic news paragraph. I have translated the text to understand it. I have recorded my teacher speaking the words. The spoken formal arabic and written formal arabic is very similar in the news, so there's not a lot of trouble between written/spoken differences, at my level.

I'm entering it into an MCD, so that as I am asked to recall specific words or phrases. But the new twist is that I've used the audio editor to excerpt the phrases, as well, and added an additional answer field in my card, so I can hear the sound of the words, and check my answer!

[emk]

I'm entering it into an MCD, so that as I am asked to recall specific words or phrases. But the new twist is that I've used the audio editor to excerpt the phrases, as well, and added an additional answer field in my card, so I can hear the sound of the words, and check my answer!

This sounds very cool, and I'm totally looking forward to hearing how this works for you over the next month or so.

I've been tempted to try for a simpler version of this format, without the audio editing: just the clozed text on the front, with the answer and the full audio on the back. Let's plan on comparing our experiences at some point.

EDIT: Wait, I misunderstood. It looks like you're just using the audio editor to break stuff up, and then putting the audio on the back of the card. I'm still interested in hearing how it works out!

[sevitzky]

What was the cooler-version of what you were imagining?

I wish I could have specific audio for the cloze answers. But yes, as your edit says, I have the audio on the back. You have to select the specific "Play" icon to replay the word/phrase targeted in the cloze.

But it looks like something like this:

Cloze Front:
Arabic Target Language

Back of card:
Arabic Target Language
English Answer
> (Audio for Cloze 1)
> (Audio for Cloze 2)
> (Audio for Cloze 3)
> (Audio for Cloze 4)
etc..

(where the ">" represents Play-Audio icons, for each cloze deletion)

The audio auto-play in Anki is a bit annoying, but if I break up the audio and enter it in order, it sounds like it's just playing back the unedited audio -- **which is really just a long sentence** -- and then I can go back and replay the target word/phrase. Maybe this is the confusion; I'm not working with huge paragraphs. Arabic news sentences tend to link very long clauses together, so 1-2 arabic news sentences would be 4-5 english news sentences, roughly. All this to say, it's not a whole lot of audio on the back.

[sevitzky]

I've been thinking about making purely-audio cloze cards, also. But that's a lot of work, until somebody makes an audio processing plug-in.