Master spreadsheet, for export to SRS, etc

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Master spreadsheet, for export to SRS, etc

Postby tangleweeds » Thu Dec 10, 2015 1:17 am

In the Memrise/SRS threads, people mentioned exporting to Memrise or other SRS from a spreadsheet they keep of vocab, grammatical forms, whatever they want to remember. I'd love to be able to do bulk import into Memrise, Anki, etc, while retaining a master copy, but have only basic spreadsheet skills. I unclearly remember someone uploading an example spreadsheet for this over on HTLAL. I tried via google searches to find it, but couldn't pin it down. Can anyone point me toward it?

Also, I'm curious about people's language spreadsheets. What all you keep in it, just L2 => L1? Or also part of speech, example usage sentences, etc? Or other stuff entirely?
Last edited by tangleweeds on Fri Dec 11, 2015 6:37 am, edited 2 times in total.
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Re: Master spreadsheet, for export to SRS, etc

Postby smallwhite » Thu Dec 10, 2015 2:07 am

tangleweeds wrote:but have only basic spreadsheet skills


Go learn it! Find a book or a website in French or in Japanese and learn to use spreadsheets! Excel is powerful not only in numeric and data manipulation, but also in (bulk) text manipulation. I use it all the time in all different ways in my language learning (and in life). Printing Japanese characters in greyscale to trace over was one example. Before my French exam I had random numbers machine-read to me (bombarding at me) the whole evening to get myself to parse them instantaneously. To analyse your learning progress, of course, and to analyse whether your studies have been well-rounded or lop-sided. Well, that's the typical data analysis you'd expect from Excel but, hey, what's more important that keeping on track and making progress, right?

tangleweeds wrote:Also, I'm curious about people's language spreadsheets. What all you keep in it, just L2 => L1? Or also part of speech, example usage sentences, etc? Or other stuff entirely?


Varies depending on my learning goals for that period, and varies within a period as well. Only 2 fields are always there: L1, L2.
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Re: Master spreadsheet, for export to SRS, etc

Postby MorkTheFiddle » Thu Dec 10, 2015 6:58 pm

Instead of spreadsheets, you could keep data in tables in a word processing program like Word or LibreOffice Writer. Then save the table as a tab-delimited file (comma delimited files--or csv, as they are called--are okay provided there are no commas in any of your data). Then simply copy/paste the file into Memrise or whatever. I think each of these programs, Anki, Quizlet, Cram, StudyStack or whatever, uses a slightly different import technique, but I am pretty sure all accept copy/paste. (Though it has been a long time since I used Anki.)

But if you use a spreadsheet, then you can also save spreadsheets (Excel but apparently not LibreOffice Calc) as tab-delimited files, too. If you are forced to save as a comma-delimited file, then you can use semicolons instead of commas in your text. One must also be on the lookout to save files in unicode.

In addition to the things you mention, one might keep in a spreadsheet or table (a) pictures to illustrate a word or idea, (b) sound files, and (c) nowadays links to videos, articles (such as in Wikipedia and so on) and whatnot on the Internet.

Note too that most SMS applications also let you export data, if you want to build up a master file from them.

Hope this helps.
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Re: Master spreadsheet, for export to SRS, etc

Postby rdearman » Thu Dec 10, 2015 7:35 pm

MorkTheFiddle wrote:But if you use a spreadsheet, then you can also save spreadsheets (Excel but apparently not LibreOffice Calc) as tab-delimited files, too. If you are forced to save as a comma-delimited file, then you can use semicolons instead of commas in your text. One must also be on the lookout to save files in unicode.

You can do this in calc. When you go to "Save" (or "Save as"), you select Text CSV (.csv) as I suspect you have been doing, but you also check the box "Edit filter settings".
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Re: Master spreadsheet, for export to SRS, etc

Postby tangleweeds » Thu Dec 10, 2015 10:31 pm

OK, I've got a spreadsheet book from the library, and have been playing with software. One fear is that my brain will decide it needs to know ALL ABOUT SPREADSHEETS, NOW! and forget about languages entirely. I'm the writer who got a Mac for word processing, and ended up back in school studying computer science instead (famous last words: "But how does it work?").

What advantages might LibreCalc have over Google Sheets? A big plus to Google is my motley crew of devices, a laptop running Ubuntu, a vintage iPad, and an Android phone. Excel is off the table entirely, and Google already owns my soul via Gmail, so the privacy of my vocabulary list is moot. :roll:

Worksheets seem useful, but I'm not quite sure for what. Advice is welcome.
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Re: Master spreadsheet, for export to SRS, etc

Postby jeff_lindqvist » Thu Dec 10, 2015 11:06 pm

As MorkTheFiddle said, you don't need a spreadsheet. For a given deck, I have a simple .txt file. Two fields: Target language (tab) Native language. As simple as that. I import it in Anki (CTRL+I) and it works like a charm.
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Re: Master spreadsheet, for export to SRS, etc

Postby smallwhite » Fri Dec 11, 2015 1:08 am

tangleweeds wrote:Worksheets seem useful, but I'm not quite sure for what. Advice is welcome.


The examples I wrote above; to replace Anki/Memrise altogether (RDearman uploaded a sample file); to copy and re-format other people's Memrise courses so you can make changes and then upload as your own course; to identify difficult words and work on them (to clear confusions / to write clearer prompts / to study them more frequently / to delete them)...

Ideas will come to you when you've learned what functions there are.
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Re: Master spreadsheet, for export to SRS, etc

Postby dampingwire » Sat Dec 12, 2015 12:55 am

MorkTheFiddle wrote:But if you use a spreadsheet, then you can also save spreadsheets (Excel but apparently not LibreOffice Calc) as tab-delimited files, too. If you are forced to save as a comma-delimited file, then you can use semicolons instead of commas in your text.


I generally use a spreadsheet to log new words and sentences. So I'll come across a new word, look it up and add it and its translation, its kana (since I'm doing Japanese), the part of speech and the tag (i.e. the source of the data) to the first few columns of a row. Then I repeat over however long it is that I'm accumulating words.

For sentences I record the original sentence, the kana version and the translation and finally the tag.

Then I save as CSV and import into Anki. I've never had a problem with commas in the original sentence. If, for example, my sentence was

one, two, three

and the tag was

TEST

I'd expect the corresponding like of the CSV to look like:

"one, two, three", TEST

and it should load fine into Anki.

I use LibreCalc and it "just works" for me.

I tend to use Anki as my main datastore. If I ever need the data back out, then Anki will quite happily export to CSV and both Excel and LibreCalc will read that just fine. Memrise lets you export as CSV (or at least it did for me a year or so ago). CSV is quite basic: I imagine almost everything supports it on the way in and on the way out.
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Re: Master spreadsheet, for export to SRS, etc

Postby mcthulhu » Fri Apr 14, 2017 7:19 pm

(I know this is an old post.) I used to use Excel quite happily during a class where MS Office programs were about all that was available. These days I use a SQL database with fields for language, source term, translation, tags, and context as my main repository, mainly because the SQLite database is embedded within other tools that can query and apply it directly. If I were to expand on this structure (which is good enough for now for personal use) I'd probably try to ensure compatibility with some dialect of the TBX (Term Base eXchange) standard, probably TBX-Min (see http://www.tbxconvert.gevterm.net/tbx-m ... _Intro.pdf for an example of the fields covered) or TBX-Basic if I were feeling ambitious. Following a standard for glossaries would make it easier to move data among tools that support the standard, e.g. there are a lot of computer-assisted translation tools that can import/export TBX files for their glossary databases. Full TBX still seems like overkill.
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Re: Master spreadsheet, for export to SRS, etc

Postby Iversen » Sat Apr 15, 2017 11:27 am

I use Excel (and also LibreCalc), but not as a store for vocabulary. I have all my statistics from past vocabulary counts in one spreadsheet, and in another there is a page for languages used and another for pictures shown in my log thread. That's all. My wordlists are all manual and done on paper with a selection of ballpoint pens in different colours. I do however from my now-happily-ended working days have some experience with im- and exports from spreadsheets. Actually it was an important part of my duties to make systems that could do that. In one case we got files in three different formats from three different companies about letters sent to hospital patients, and I had to make a system that kept a record of the persons who already had got a certain letter so that they didn't receive it more than once. And I ended up making a system with a excel sheet that contained a self starting macro that parsed the incoming messages and updated a log file. A collegue of mine made a routine that collected the incoming files and opened the spreadsheet (which of course was put in an ultra safe place - self starting macros is a wellknown trick used by internet criminals !). So I do know a thing or two about getting data out of spreadsheets. The problem is fetching the data when they are placed on handscribbled pages and notes jotted down on weird little pieces of paper for later memorization.
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