Navik wrote:Anyway, I would like to know how you just "convert" the text into an Anki deck. I mean, I guess you do that on your computer, right?
It's actually pretty quick to do, though it took me a while figure out all the steps the first time around (I'm probably going to forget something so let me know if it doesn't work the first time).
I use Anki on my Android phone (which has a free app - you have to buy the iPhone app) with headphones, using swipe gestures so I can quickly move through a deck. However, I add cards on my laptop, because it's a lot easier to edit there. Everything is synced for free in the cloud when you set up an Anki account.
Most people use Anki either to create pairing between words with the same/similar meanings in different languages (Q: the Dog - A: el Perro) or using pictures (Q: Picture of Dog - A: el Perro). Or using Cloze cards where your question card has a missing element which you have to fill in. However, I really like sentence cards where your question is a sentence in your L2, and the answer is either blank, or a (semi-)translation of the sentence. That way you can quickly reinforce meanings you don't know, within the context of your L2.
Converting an entire ebook into an Anki deck is pretty easy.
1. First, you need to save the ebook as a txt file. You can do this by importing your ebook into a program called Calibre, and exporting as a txt file. You may have to remove the DRM from the ebook first, which Calibre can help you with.
2. Open your txt file in a text editor. Do a search for carriage returns and replace them with spaces. Then search for all full stops, explanation marks, and question marks, and replace them with carriage returns. Save this as a new text file. Now you have a text file, in which every line is one sentence from the book.
3. Cut-and-paste this into a column in a spreadsheet program like Excel.
4. Open the text file with the Chrome browser which has the Google Translation extension, this will translate your complete file. (Note: Using Google translate from the web won't translate the entire book). Cut and paste this translation into the second column in your spreadsheet.
5. Create a third column called Audio, and fourth called Tags. If you like you can add to the Tag column chapter numbers so if you want later you can filter your Anki deck by chapter (or whatever else you put in the tags) if you want to for instance study only the words in particular chapter.
6. Save the file in .csv format, which you can now import into Anki as a new deck.
7. If you want use the Awesome_TTS extension on Anki to create audio for your files.
It might not work perfectly the first time, but once you work out the bugs it's remarkably easy to do. I'm currently doing 20 new sentences a day, and am putting unknown words into another Anki deck to build up my vocabulary. I'll probably increase the number of sentences in a few weeks once I get more comfortable with reading Spanish.
