kunsttyv wrote:emk: an Anki import plug-in could be handy, but I just want to point out that it took me maybe less than a minute from the time the .csv and media files were created until I had a working Anki deck of 776 cards. The instructions were crystal clear. So I don't know how crucial such a plug-in would be. But then again I have previous experience with deck creation and the process might not be as obvious to everyone.
I'd really love to make it easy people who don't know much about Anki! I was pretty happy with how my old SRS Collector worked—every time you started Anki, it would check for new cards to import, and handle everything automatically. It would even create any necessary templates.
kunsttyv wrote:My Spanish has gotten relatively advanced lately, I mostly work extensively with native media, and I have been thinking that this type of cards are better suited at a more elementary level. But now I wonder... When I realized how quickly and painlessly I'm able to create these decks, maybe it's worth it to give it a go and see what it can do for my Spanish.
OK, so here's what I'm wrestling with.
I've found that subs2srs-style audio
cards work great even at advanced levels. Most of my experiments with this involved MC Solaar rap songs. I tried three different techniques:
- Listening repeatedly with a transcript. This helped me understand the song for a little while, but I quickly forgot the harder details and I couldn't understand the tricky parts a few months later.
- Listening repeatedly without a transcript, transcribing the audio, and checking against a transcript. This worked much better than (1). It takes a fair bit of time, and it can be slightly frustrating, but I understood these songs better and continue to understand most of the tricky bits long afterwards.
- Turning a song into subs2srs cards. This worked even better than (2), and it burnt the songs into my memory. Years afterwards, I can still hear virtually every single syllable, no matter how fast the speech or how obscure the cultural references.
I strongly recommend (2). It's a great technique, especially without access to technology. But at least for me, (3) has worked even better. There's something interesting about spaced repetition and sound. Somehow spaced repetition allows me go beyond the standard
echoic memory (where you can hear an "echo" of what you just heard a few seconds ago), and drop specific phrases into either my long-term auditory memory or perhaps my
music-related memory. Once a sound card has "matured" after 25 to 30 days, I can "hear" the dialog in my head the same way I can hear the lyrics to 80s pop songs: My brain preserves the rhythm, the intonation, even the nuances of unfamiliar vowels.
This isn't a miracle technique or anything, but it does offer a really nice boost. It helps with "decoding" fast audio and with remembering lots of useful fragments of speech. Basically, I'm treating language-learning as a brute-force memory exercise, with a focus on accurate sound memory.
But there's a practical problem at advanced levels. At the beginner level, it makes sense to just turn an entire episode into cards. But once I reach B1, or even C1, I can already understand a large chunk of the audio with no problems. And at that point, spending two hours cleaning and importing an episode is a waste of time. After all, I'm going to throw out 95% of the cards.
So what I really want is to watch the episode normally, and just make maybe 10 cards from dialog I didn't understand. But this only makes sense if all the tools get a
lot better, and if all the pointless manual work gets automated. Ideally, you should just open up a video file (with embedded image subtitles!) in a media player, watch normally, mark a few cards, and have everything show up magically in your spaced repetition software.
I would
love to do this with difficult French series like
Engrenages and
Kaamelott and
Le Trône de fer in French. I can watch all of these series without subtitles and enjoy them, but I still miss more of the dialog than I'd like. A since (3), above, is the single most effective technique I've tried for "intensive" listening, I want to try to apply it.
Of course, I do often wonder whether I'm just optimizing everything to work well for me, personally, and ignoring what works best for other people. I figure the only way to find out is to build something and let people try it!