Audio sentences vs Without Audio sentences in Anki?

[bolaobo]

I use audio sentences, and I drill them in Anki with a separate card. I was originally skeptical of this approach, but I've found it has helped my listening immensely and cements the sentence into my brain. When I just use a text card, I naturally revert to my much stronger reading ability and my listening suffers for it. Making two cards is theoretically twice the time reviewing, but I can review the listening portion relatively quickly (I either understand it or I don't) and in the long run I think it makes my comprehension faster overall for both cards.

It takes more time to review, it takes time to extract the audio, but I think it's worth it in the long run if you want a more balanced skill set.

The only languages I don't do this for Latin (dead language) and English (my native language, my listening is fine lol).

By the way, Azure Neural TTS is very, very good. It's not perfect, but it's good enough for me in most cases.

[einzelne]

Try audacity https://manual.audacityteam.org/man/silence_finder.html

Yes, that's what I used. But how do you imagine to cut around 500-1000 sentences from a single audiofile of 7-10 hours without loosing your mind? It's so time consuming, I quickly gave up.

The automated app I had in mind is the soft which can relate audio and text and cut automatically the audio passages on the basis of your highlights in the text.

[rdearman]

Try audacity https://manual.audacityteam.org/man/silence_finder.html

Yes, that's what I used. But how do you imagine to cut around 500-1000 sentences from a single audiofile of 7-10 hours without loosing your mind? It's so time consuming, I quickly gave up.

The automated app I had in mind is the soft which can relate audio and text and cut automatically the audio passages on the basis of your highlights in the text.

Workaudiobook can do this, but not SRS.

[einzelne]

Workaudiobook can do this, but not SRS.

They don't have a Mac version, alas. Besides, if I understood it correctly, if you want to synchronize audio and text, you have to add timecodes manually.

[german2k01]

Btw, there is an independent company that has created the first 3000 audio sentences in several languages. They used a corpus for selecting their sentences and audio is recorded by native speakers.They will be creating Anki decks for Mandarin, Russian and Japanese in the near future.

I have recently bought a German deck. I am impressed by their professionally done deck for German. I only paid a one-time payment of 11, 99 euros and also have free access to the first 3000 audio sentences in other languages including French, Spanish, Italian etc.

I used a discount coupon from Herr Antrim.

Review of Deckmill:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mOoZme6lKvM&t=237s

https://deckmill.com/

[Le Baron]

Btw, there is an independent company that has created the first 3000 audio sentences in several languages. They used a corpus for selecting their sentences and audio is recorded by native speakers.They will be creating Anki decks for Mandarin, Russian and Japanese in the near future.

I have recently bought a German deck. I am impressed by their professionally done deck for German. I only paid a one-time payment of 11, 99 euros and also have free access to the first 3000 audio sentences in other languages including French, Spanish, Italian etc.

I used a discount coupon from Herr Antrim.

Review of Deckmill:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mOoZme6lKvM&t=237s

https://deckmill.com/

I like sentences for building fluency patterns and this seems like a fair deal, but you should be also beware that even paid content is of variable quality. Some of the free Anki decks are are also variable, but some are good.

I just went to the website and the sample sentences - so the ones they are using to promote the decks - are not all up to scratch. I looked at both French and Dutch. The first sentence: 'My brother's a doctor' is rendered in Dutch as 'mijn broer is doktor'. This is a bit unnatural. It would be either 'mijn broer is (een) arts' or 'mijn broer is een doktor'. I'd say arts turns up more. Some may quibble with this and say the sentence is okay, but I'm basing it upon what I commonly hear.

The audio for the German and French sounds good. The audio for the Dutch is that from Google translate.

I'm not trying to dissuade anyone from using these, just to beware. Glossika, which is also a mass sentence programme (at cost) has quite a number of errors. I only noticed these in the Spanish by chance and then checking with a Spanish speaker.

[german2k01]

I like sentences for building fluency patterns and this seems like a fair deal, but you should be also beware that even paid content is of variable quality. Some of the free Anki decks are are also variable, but some are good.

Yes, I am using it more for training my mouth muscles. It is nice to hear individual sounds at different speeds and cards are reviewed in both directions. Sometimes you shell out a little bit of money for trying out what other options are there in terms of quality. I have reviewed 120 cards in 4 days so far and no way I get the impression that they are written formally. More likely they can be used in a conversation and be able to convey general meaning. Even in a casual conversation, natives slur words and leave out articles or prepositions.Still the overall meaning is conveyed. It is a great time saver for me if I have to create all these audio sentences from scratch.

[Le Baron]

Yes, I am using it more for training my mouth muscles. It is nice to hear individual sounds at different speeds and cards are reviewed in both directions. Sometimes you shell out a little bit of money for trying out what other options are there in terms of quality. I have reviewed 120 cards in 4 days so far and no way I get the impression that they are written formally. More likely they can be used in a conversation and be able to convey general meaning. Even in a casual conversation, natives slur words and leave out articles or prepositions.Still the overall meaning is conveyed. It is a great time saver for me if I have to create all these audio sentences from scratch.

I agree they are very useful and it saves a lot of bother looking up how a written sentence sounds. You can just mirror the pronunciation straight away. The eagerness for learners to mimic the very casual native manner of speaking is a bit exaggerated at times. You see (on e.g you tube) people trying to develop the 'street' language way of talking before they've even worked out the standard way of speaking! So I'm not too bothered about a bit of formality vs 'vernacular'.

Apart from perhaps very common words which turn up so often that not knowing them puts you at a disadvantage. For example if in French you don't know common slang words like bouffer (eat), boulot (job/work)...etc which are said all the time. These tend not to turn up in official flashcards and courses.

[german2k01]

Agreed. These decks can not be a substitute but more as a compliment. You pick up collocations and slang through watching television shows. Overall, it is one of the options for improving pronunciation and fluency. However, language learners are free to choose their own path based on their needs. If they can find better-quality audio decks elsewhere, so be it.

[Le Baron]

Agreed. These decks can not be a substitute but more as a compliment. You pick up collocations and slang through watching television shows. Overall, it is one of the options for improving pronunciation and fluency. However, language learners are free to choose their own path based on their needs. If they can find better-quality audio decks elsewhere, so be it.

I hope I haven't given the impression that I think such decks are of inferior quality? I'm sure they're fine. My only note was that it's hard to know if something is or isn't accurate, because there are lot of 'internet entrepreneurs' who just run things through translation programmes.

In any case the proof will be in the pudding and you seem to benefiting from them and that's all that matters. My minor objection is really about the difficulty of choosing what are considered the 'essential sentences'. All claim to do this, but also differ in what they think is most important. Sometimes some of the sentences will seem irrelevant or not applicable to your needs. So that likely they all have the right idea, but there's only so much you can put into a particular selection. So they're all different paths to the same goal.