jonm's occasional log: Romance family Super Challenge
Posted: Mon Nov 05, 2018 8:09 am
Hey everyone,
I'm Jon. I've been posting under the username trippingly, but I'm just gonna go with my given name.
Before I get this log going, let me just say how happy I am to have joined this great community. I've learned a lot and gotten a lot of inspiration and enjoyment from hanging out with you all.
It probably makes sense to start by talking about a technique that I use for all of my languages. It involves Anki and, often, Assimil.
Basically, I like working with what you could call dictation cards. I hear a sentence and type what I hear. Then I flip to the back of the card, compare what I’ve typed against the original, and listen to the sentence a couple more times and practice saying it.
The dictation, I find, is good for listening and spelling, and the repetition is good for pronunciation. But above all, what I like about these cards is that I spend a little time with each sentence and notice things about how it's put together.
Here's an example of what the back side looks like when I've gotten something wrong. (Happy to share the CSS if anyone's interested. Nothing fancy, but I prefer it to Anki's default styling for typed answers and corrections.)
My number one source for sentences is Assimil. I'm a big fan of their courses (but no connection to the company). I like the overall design, the notes, the voice acting, the sense of humor... And for each sentence, they provide a separate mp3 with the corresponding text in the tags, which makes it fairly easy to batch import an entire course into Anki.
So for each Assimil dialogue, first I listen, read, and check out the notes in the usual way, and then I also add the cards for that dialogue to my Anki rotation.
I've also made cards out of sentences from other sources—podcasts, audiobooks, films, shows—but cutting up the audio myself takes more time, so I often don't bother and just enjoy that material in a more extensive way.
OK, that's probably a good place to break. In my next post I'll talk about specific languages.
I'm Jon. I've been posting under the username trippingly, but I'm just gonna go with my given name.
Before I get this log going, let me just say how happy I am to have joined this great community. I've learned a lot and gotten a lot of inspiration and enjoyment from hanging out with you all.
It probably makes sense to start by talking about a technique that I use for all of my languages. It involves Anki and, often, Assimil.
Basically, I like working with what you could call dictation cards. I hear a sentence and type what I hear. Then I flip to the back of the card, compare what I’ve typed against the original, and listen to the sentence a couple more times and practice saying it.
The dictation, I find, is good for listening and spelling, and the repetition is good for pronunciation. But above all, what I like about these cards is that I spend a little time with each sentence and notice things about how it's put together.
Here's an example of what the back side looks like when I've gotten something wrong. (Happy to share the CSS if anyone's interested. Nothing fancy, but I prefer it to Anki's default styling for typed answers and corrections.)
My number one source for sentences is Assimil. I'm a big fan of their courses (but no connection to the company). I like the overall design, the notes, the voice acting, the sense of humor... And for each sentence, they provide a separate mp3 with the corresponding text in the tags, which makes it fairly easy to batch import an entire course into Anki.
So for each Assimil dialogue, first I listen, read, and check out the notes in the usual way, and then I also add the cards for that dialogue to my Anki rotation.
I've also made cards out of sentences from other sources—podcasts, audiobooks, films, shows—but cutting up the audio myself takes more time, so I often don't bother and just enjoy that material in a more extensive way.
OK, that's probably a good place to break. In my next post I'll talk about specific languages.