Thank you for trying it! Thank you very much for your feedback; it helps a lot. I will be following your log very closely, so please don't hesitate to mention any problems.
CDR wrote:The first song I tried it with, in Portuguese, it came out blank. I tried a different song and it kind of worked, but not as nicely as Emk's did, a lot more errors. I uploaded it to Anki using Substudy and tried it out, it was just okay, lots of poor alignment on the lyrics that I had been too lazy to fix.
I tried another song, and this time I used a subtitle editing program to fix any issues before hand. It took me a bit, but still, I would have never bothered doing this if Substudy hadn't done the majority of heavy lifting. This made a huge difference when it came to actually studying the cards.
If substudy is failing on any songs in Portuguese or Japanese, please let me know the singer and the song title. I might be interested in doing a little MP3 shopping and checking a few of them out myself!
For Portuguese, I want to dig into the poor alignment. I know that Whisper supports a handful of major languages very well, but I want to see what's actually happening in Portuguese. As for Japanese, I suspect the problem may be really simple: Japanese usually doesn't put spaces between words. Substudy is doing a
lot of postprocessing to improve subtitle timing, and parts of that are looking for spaces.
So it probably just fails outright for any language without spaces.
The good news is that I have the option of disabling my postprocessing code, and just asking Whisper for SRT subtitles directly. I don't know how tightly it times subtitles, but it's surely going to work better for Japanese than what I'm trying now.
CDR wrote:Then I used Substudy to translate the subtitles and put into Anki. This worked well, but I want to try a video without subtitles in Japanese in the future, I think it should be able to transcribe non-music.
Ah, good, I'm happy to hear translation is working for Japanese!
CDR wrote:I've only been using the cards for two days now, so a bit early to give my thoughts on the earworm method
.
Oh, no, I've created a "method"!
Nothing that I am doing here should be conisdered anything as responsible and grown up as a "method".
If this approach is working at all for you, here's what I'd expect:
- When your cards are about a week old, you should be hearing many of them better and feeling like you're getting something out this exercise.
- When your cards start to "mature" in Anki (30-40 days old), then a lot of the more difficult listening cards should feel easy now. This is a lot like my advice for Assimil—if you're not sure it's working, look back 30 lessons.
- If you're starting a language from scratch, which Sprachprofi and I have done, then things seem to start coming together around 1,000-1,500 cards from a single very easy show, plus 30-60 hours of Anki reviews, a big chunk of them to "maturity." At this point, you might be able to "follow along" with 30-40% of easy dialog in new episodes, if you already know the plot. If nothing else, it's a neat party trick. But weirdly, it barely seems to fade at all—I completely neglected Spanish for over half a decade, and my Avatar comprehension has come back quickly.
Your mileage may vary, as we used to say in US. Results may not be typical. If this doesn't work for you, you may be entitled to a full refund of $0 on substudy.
But not your OpenAPI fees!
CDR wrote:He talks a lot about memory and how we need to convince our brain that random foreign words are important to remember, and the different levels of memory. I thought that was quite interesting and it's quite novel to me.
I think Gabriel Wyner has a lot of really interesting ideas.
As I've studied languages, I've come to the conclusion that (1) the brain is quite good at learning languages, even as an adult, but (2) learning a language is a huge "cognitive investment", so (3) your brain will happily avoid making that investment if it doesn't see any returns. This is why raising kids in bilingual environments works reasonably well until they go to kindergarten, at which point they'll focus 99% of their efforts on the language spoken on the playground. Kids are brilliant language learners for languages they
need. One of the major reasons adults appear bad at learning languages is that we often have the skills and money to avoid getting put into a situation where we have no choice but to learn (or we can't afford it, if we want to eat).
One of the things that I realized when I restarted my Spanish was that I had already found
tons of cool things to do in Spanish. Like, I'm always delighted to watch Avatar again, and I want to sing along to every Mägo de Oz song ever, and I have these great playlists, and a stack of DVDs, and wouldn't it be fun to read the Dresden Files in Spanish, and Blacksad is
so cool, and... !
You get the idea. I'm basically convincing my brain that Spanish is full so
so many awesome things to do. With French, I also tried the slightly more ruthless experiment of doing
everything in French for a few months. This convinced my brain that if I was going to be able to
talk, I had to get good quickly.
I do think that Anki cards you make yourself are usually better than random shared decks. With substudy, my goal has been slightly different, which is to make cards that tie into interesting media, or that are part of an interesting story, or that I can eventually sing along to. The plot and the emotion help. And I find the cards just plain fun to review.
CDR wrote:The Japanese word for baseball has been a leech for me since 2022, it always gets suspended in Anki.
I would like to make a radical suggestion. What if you didn't learn the Japanese word for baseball?
Just let it go, and wait for it to come back someday in the context of a movie, or a book, or an interesting news story? Or if you're really determined to conquer this word, watch some
some Japanese baseball?
This is why I set my leech threshold super low for substudy cards, and I suspend them so aggressively. If something is proving difficult to learn, I let it go and wait for it to come back in a better context. Cards are
so cheap to make, given the right tools.
And once again, thank you very much for your feedback!
