What is Assimil's "Super Pack?"

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kanewai
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What is Assimil's "Super Pack?"

Postby kanewai » Mon Feb 06, 2017 7:03 pm

For a couple years now Assimil courses have come in a "superpack" - Book + 4 audio CDs + 1 CD mp3.

I have always uploaded the mp3 files to iTunes, and played them like any other audiobook. No problems there. However, it looks like there are a hundreds of other files on the "1 CD mp3" disc, all in separate folders. It almost appears as if each individual exercise has it's own unique file. It would be awesome to have the exercises independent of the dialogues, but I am not about to open 100 folders and 100*5 subfolders and download them each individually, and I can't find any .exe file.

The instructions on how to use it are vague: Follow the instructions on your mp3 player to upload the content.

Does anyone know what the hell a superpack is, or how to use it?
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Re: What is Assimil's "Super Pack?"

Postby Arnaud » Mon Feb 06, 2017 7:47 pm

On the MP3 disc, there are also X subfolders corresponding to the X lessons of the book.
Each subfolder contain the tracks of each sentence of the dialogues and the sentences of the 1st exercise (no sub-subfolder, all the tracks are labeled clearly, so you can rapidly copy/paste what you want)
To have a better idea I join a screen shot of the lesson #50 of the Japanese.
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Re: What is Assimil's "Super Pack?"

Postby Speakeasy » Mon Feb 06, 2017 8:11 pm

I found your description of the Assimil Super Pack quite good; that is, every line of dialogue is, indeed, a separate file. In addition, the text version of the dialogue is displayed on my mp3 player.

Generally speaking, I convert the Assimil CDs to mp3 files and define the Windows File Parameters in a manner that renders them (from my perspective) easier to group by language, et cetera on my Sony Walkman. As an exercise, I followed the instructions for the Assimil German Super Pack mp3 files and loaded them onto my Walkman. It might be that I am slow to adapt (okay, I am slow to adapt), but I did not enjoy the experience of working with them. In addition (and this is mostly due to my own preferences of grouping several language courses on my Walkman) converting the Windows File Parameters large number of Super Pack files and folders represented too onerous a task for me. For this reason, I continue to convert the CDs to mp3.

My "not-so-positive" experiences with Assimil Super Pack mp3 files are heavily influenced by my particular use of the Windows File Parameters for grouping of my language courses on my Sony Walkman; otherwise, I have read several comments extolling their virtues ... they're just not my cup of tea.
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Re: What is Assimil's "Super Pack?"

Postby sfuqua » Tue Feb 07, 2017 3:50 am

I use a playlist of the thousands of files to make anki cards.

The thousands of mp3 files could be used for chorusing.

If I'm shadowing, I just use the regular files.
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Re: What is Assimil's "Super Pack?"

Postby kanewai » Tue Feb 07, 2017 8:25 pm

The tracks for Le Latin aren't as well labeled.

Image


And importing them gives me a few words of target-language dialogue for each track, but no translation.

Image

This doesn't seem that useful to me. I can see how it would be nice to have the individual tracks to create Anki decks, but I can't imagine how many hundreds of hours of work that would take. I could probably learn to read Cicero faster than I could create a Le Latin deck with this.
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Re: What is Assimil's "Super Pack?"

Postby Arnaud » Tue Feb 07, 2017 9:36 pm

In the superpack Latin (the book by Isabelle Ducos-Filippi, not the last re-issue of Desessard that I don't have) there is a .txt file containing the written sentence of each mp3 track, something I don't see on your screenshot. What edition of Latin are you talking of ? Probably the very last one by Desessard, as I see more than 5 translation sentences in the lesson #15...(I see only 5 of them on my version)
Edit: there is also a .txt file containing all the sentences of the lesson...

Code: Select all

N6 : Lectio sexta
S00-TITLE : In Lucii villa
S01 : In Lucii villa, quae in Campania est, manemus.
S02 : Villa pulcherrima maximaque est.
S03 : Sunt rosae in horto.
S04 : Tessellae januam ornant.
S05 : Ibi "cave canem" legere possumus !
T00-TRANSLATE : Exercitatio prima - Converte
T01 : Insula maxima est.
T02 : In pulcherrima insula habitant.
T03 : In villa quae Romae est manemus.
T04 : Sunt tesselae in janua.
T05 : Ancilla in horto est.
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Re: What is Assimil's "Super Pack?"

Postby DaveBee » Fri Feb 24, 2017 12:21 am

sfuqua wrote:I use a playlist of the thousands of files to make anki cards.

The thousands of mp3 files could be used for chorusing.

If I'm shadowing, I just use the regular files.
Chorusing is the use I had in mind. But I didn't know it was called chorusing! :-)
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Re: What is Assimil's "Super Pack?"

Postby sfuqua » Fri Feb 24, 2017 1:43 am

I use mp3tag to make a playlist of the mp3 files. I sort by directory to put the files in correct order. I open the playlist file with notepad++ and use regular expressions to slice everything away except for the titles of the tracks. Then I paste the list of sentences into a spreadsheet. I take the text file with the sentences and open the file with chrome and use google translate to produce rough translations into English. I copy and paste the translated sentences into the spreadsheet.
I save it as a .csv file making sure that I save it as utf-8.

It takes about 10 minutes to produce a couple of thousand anki cards.
Regular expressions rule.
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Re: What is Assimil's "Super Pack?"

Postby jeffers » Tue Mar 14, 2017 2:29 pm

There's one more great thing about the Assimil mp3 discs: they files have lyrics. So if you have a media player which displays embedded lyrics it will show the words being spoken, both on the full lesson files and the smaller files. I found this a great way to review Assimil lessons while travelling, because I could listen to tracks and read along on my phone without pulling out the textbook.

The problem is, most Android media players don't have the option to show embedded lyrics, or it is only available on the premium version. Other apps which talk about showing lyrics pull them from lyric databases rather than use embedded lyrics. After a lot of searching, I found that the free version of Rocket Player shows lyrics. From my memory, I'm pretty sure Windows Media Player can show lyrics, and I think Apple players have no problem either.

(EDIT I haven't done this for over a year, so Rocket player may have shifted this feature to premium. But when I was working through Assimil Hindi, I used Rocket player to display the lyrics on both my Kindle Fire and Android phone).
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Re: What is Assimil's "Super Pack?"

Postby Tomás » Tue Mar 14, 2017 2:39 pm

jeffers wrote:There's one more great thing about the Assimil mp3 discs: they files have lyrics. So if you have a media player which displays embedded lyrics it will show the words being spoken, both on the full lesson files and the smaller files. I found this a great way to review Assimil lessons while travelling, because I could listen to tracks and read along on my phone without pulling out the textbook.

The problem is, most Android media players don't have the option to show embedded lyrics, or it is only available on the premium version. Other apps which talk about showing lyrics pull them from lyric databases rather than use embedded lyrics. After a lot of searching, I found that the free version of Rocket Player shows lyrics. From my memory, I'm pretty sure Windows Media Player can show lyrics, and I think Apple players have no problem either.

(EDIT I haven't done this for over a year, so Rocket player may have shifted this feature to premium. But when I was working through Assimil Hindi, I used Rocket player to display the lyrics on both my Kindle Fire and Android phone).


Did they display in Devanagari?
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