How many srs sentence cards does it take to "learn" a language?

General discussion about learning languages
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sfuqua
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Language Log: https://forum.language-learners.org/vie ... =15&t=9248
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Re: How many srs sentence cards does it take to "learn" a language?

Postby sfuqua » Thu Apr 28, 2016 1:13 pm

I hate copying sentences one by one. What I do is put the whole book into anki as a series of sentences. I have my anki set up to do "new" sentences last, so after I finish all of my reviews, I start to read the book in anki. If I read a sentence easily and understand every word, and I find the sentence "boring", I delete it. I am left with sentences in my deck that are hard for me or interesting in some way. You only get a page or two ahead in the book each day, but it is the equivalent of very intensive reading. Anki does what it does best, review.
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荒海や佐渡によこたふ天の川

the rough sea / stretching out towards Sado / the Milky Way
Basho[1689]

Sometimes Japanese is just too much...

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lusan
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Re: How many srs sentence cards does it take to "learn" a language?

Postby lusan » Thu Apr 28, 2016 1:34 pm

sfuqua wrote:What I do is put the whole book into anki as a series of sentences.


I like it very much. How do you do it?

Am correct thinking that it could be done with these steps:

1. Use Words to process document
2. Replace all ". <space>" into ". <Carriage return>
3. Save as Txt
4. Dump into Anki
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User avatar
sfuqua
Black Belt - 1st Dan
Posts: 1642
Joined: Sun Jul 19, 2015 5:05 am
Location: san jose, california
Languages: Bad English: native
Samoan: speak, but rusty
Tagalog: imperfect, but use all the time
Spanish: read
French: read some
Japanese: beginner, obsessively studying
Language Log: https://forum.language-learners.org/vie ... =15&t=9248
x 6299

Re: How many srs sentence cards does it take to "learn" a language?

Postby sfuqua » Thu Apr 28, 2016 3:47 pm

I take the book and convert it to text first. Then I edit it with notepad++ to change all carriage returns to spaces, making the book one very long line. Then I add a carriage return after every ?!.: the book is then a list of sentences. If the author is one of those people who has very,very long sentences (Gabriel García Márquez for instance), I break up some of the monster sentences by breaking them after punctuations, every 80 characters, to make items for anki that aren't more than 12 to 15 words long. The commands to do this in notepad++ are:

1) remove carriage returns — search \r\n replace <space>
2)break into sentences — search ([\?\!\.\;] ) replace \1\r\n
3)chop up monster sentences (without the .=\r\n box checked) search (.{80}[[:punct:]])(.{80}) replace \1\r\n\2
This breaks up sentences that are over 2 lines long. García Márquez has one book that is 300 pages long that has only 14 sentences, so it needs breaking up to make reasonable sentence cards.
4)I remove " — search " replace —
This removes ", which would confuse libreoffice calc and replaces it with an M-dash.

5) Copy the sentences into column A of a libreoffice calc file.
6) Save the file containing the list of sentences. Drag and drop the file into chrome (which has a google translate extension installed) Tell chrome to translate it to English.
7) Control-A and Control-C to copy the translated version.
8) Put the translated set of sentences into notepad++ and remove " — search " replace —
9) Copy the translated sentences into column B of the libreoffice calc file.
10)Save the libreoffice calc file as a csv file. Be sure to select UTF-8 as the character encoding and <tab> as the separator.
11) import the file into anki as a basic file and you have a deck of sentences from the book in order, with the English translation on the back. Google Translate makes mistakes, but since it is you L1, they should be easy to see through when you go in.

There are many other ways of doing the same thing. This is what I use with my Windows computer and my free software.
7 x
荒海や佐渡によこたふ天の川

the rough sea / stretching out towards Sado / the Milky Way
Basho[1689]

Sometimes Japanese is just too much...


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