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 Language Learning Forum : Learning Techniques, Methods & Strategies |  | |
| Thomas_DC Triglot Groupie Denmark Joined 5570 days ago 58 posts - 65 votes  Speaks: Danish*, English, French Studies: German, Arabic (Written) | Message 1 of 6 09 August 2014 at 7:47pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Has anyone got any experiences in using Subs2srs to create sentence-decks in anki (or other srs-software) ?
I'm studying arabic, and am quite enjoying studying sentences in anki, but I am constantly searching for good sources of l1 + l2 sentences with their Arabic recordings, and for this, subs2srs seems interesting to me. I just tried generating a deck with it, however, with limited success. I used the Disney film "ratatouille" dubbed in Arabic with its corresponding subtitles in Arabic and English, but I found that the two subtitle-files didn't join up as well as I had thought. Sometimes one the English version splits a sentence in two, whereas the Arabic version keeps the sentence as a whole etc. Another problem might be that the film is dubbed - I think it very likely that a dubbed film would vary in dialogue from the original in order to get the right rhythm, jokes etc. Also the Arabic subtitles might be an independent translation of the English film, and it is not necessarily corresponding with the Arabic voices. All in all - I see many potential problems with subs2srs, but still, I know that a lot of people are using it successfully. How do you do it? If anyone has used it specifically with Arabic (msa) I’d be interested in knowing which films / series you are using. Maybe I could even take a look at your deck :) - Thomas 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| luhmann Senior Member Brazil Joined 5129 days ago 156 posts - 271 votes Speaks: Portuguese* Studies: Mandarin, French, English, Italian, Spanish, Persian, Arabic (classical) | Message 2 of 6 15 August 2014 at 2:09am | IP Logged | |||||
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I tried it but it was too much of a hassle. Using sound in my SRS would slow everything down, and would not really do much for my listening comprehension, as I already do 2-4 hours of listening everyday. I turn tv serials into MP3 and listen at my lost hours, results have been impressive.
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| Thomas_DC Triglot Groupie Denmark Joined 5570 days ago 58 posts - 65 votes Speaks: Danish*, English, French Studies: German, Arabic (Written) | Message 3 of 6 15 August 2014 at 2:25pm | IP Logged | |||||
How long time do you spend on each anki-card in average? I've often seen recommendations to keep it at about 5 seconds per card, but for me it takes quite a bit longer - around 20 seconds per card. Although i have audio on almost all my cards, i rarely let the recording finish playing before continuing - but the sound is nice to have as a reference on pronunciation. One thing that's happening (and which i cannot decide whether is good or bad) - is that with the audio recording, i tend to memorize the sentence is if it were music - if i cannot remember a specific cloze, i can "replay" the sound file in my head before checking for the answer, and more often than not, this helps me to remember. The problem is that without the same context (sentence/sound) it's much harder to find the given word, so i feel as if I’m learning a "melody" rather than actually leaning language. When stumbling across the words in other contexts, though, i seem to improve my knowledge of a word, but it is strange that something i can know very well in SRS, is not necessarily something that i know that well when stumbling across the word in other situations. It seems as if the language is in my heard, but it's not yet organized in the right places. I got Subs2srs working a few days ago, and i must say that i am pleasantly surprised of how well it works. If the resources are good, the sound files will be perfectly-timed and the subtitles rather accurate. I do need to edit each card though, because the English subs are rarely literal and often they're actually quite different. I also make a point of making clozes in all my sentences. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
 emk Diglot Moderator United States Joined 5328 days ago 2615 posts - 8806 votes Speaks: English*, FrenchB2 Studies: Spanish, Ancient Egyptian Personal Language Map | Message 4 of 6 15 August 2014 at 4:38pm | IP Logged | |||||
I think that learning the language like a melody is actually very good thing, overall—it makes it easier to master prosody and intonation, and to learn what words are normally used together. If you find that you can remember certain words only in the context of a specific card, I'd guess that one of two things are happening: 1. As far as your brain is concerned, the word is too advanced for you right now. 2. You need to hear this word in a bunch more contexts before you can fully internalize it. This is much easier if you also get lots of comprehensible input on a regular basis. So if you only remember a specific word in a single context, you can either (a) wait a while longer to see if it finally "clicks" in another context, or (b) just trash the card. My general rules for subs2srs: 1. Configure it to give you three lines at a time: the current line, the line before and the line after. Put all three lines on the card (in both languages), and maybe make the two extra lines grey or something. The extra context will help enormously. 2. Configure subs2srs to leave at least 1.5 seconds of extra space before and after each audio clip. Combined with (1), this will allow you to salvage many cards that are slightly misaligned. 3. Delete, delete, delete (or suspend). I try to delete at least 80% of cards within the first two reviews, and after that, I only keep cards that are too fun or interesting to delete. With subs2srs, there's no downside to deleting cards: another two hours work will give you another thousand cards, and new contexts for all the common words.
Yeah, once I got it working, I was really impressed. Somebody clearly needs to write new software that simplifies this process greatly. There's no reason why you shouldn't be able to use Handbrake to rip a DVD to OGV format with embedded subtitle images, and then load that into a tool that (1) performed OCR on the subtitles, (2) asked you to confirm a handful of letters, and (3) automatically spit out a high-quality Anki deck. If only I had more time to hack on language-learning tools. :-) But alas, most of the real money seems to be in beginner tools and scam courses. 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Thomas_DC Triglot Groupie Denmark Joined 5570 days ago 58 posts - 65 votes Speaks: Danish*, English, French Studies: German, Arabic (Written) | Message 5 of 6 16 August 2014 at 11:03pm | IP Logged | |||||
This is more or less what i have been thinking. As i keep adding sentences to my Arabic deck i keep "memorizing" new words, but with the multitude of new content coming in each day, some words reappear. Often i recognize a word, either in the same form, or from its root. Other more difficult words stay difficult because they are rarer and they therefore do not show up in other contexts - i do memorize these words, however, so i don't have a particular problem with this. At some point when i am more advanced, I’ll stumble across the word again, and the passive memorization will get one step closer to "acquired" (as in "language acquisition") One thing that has been on my mind recently is the difficulty level of my studies. After getting through Assimil's "Arabe sans peine" (with all of its sentences put into anki with its clozes) i have now continued on to mining sentences from euronews.com (and for a few days I’ve been using subs2srs) Why euronews? - because this is the best source for written MSA with transcripts, that i have been able to find. With euronews, at least 60% of the words are unknown to me - so this is hardly Krashen's "N+1" - but more of a n+10. Even after memorizing all vocabulary in a sentence, the sentence is far from fluently understandable, and i imagine that just studying text with 90-95% known words would help me internalize the language in a much smoother way. What are your (or anybody else's) view on this n+10 problem? I do almost all of my studies in anki. I don't know if I should be alarmed about my mental state, but I actually quite enjoy it. A lot of “rules” about anki-use repeat themselves on this forum and elsewhere. You shouldn't use Anki as your primairy study-tool, and you shouldn't use Anki when learning new words, only memorizing words you already know. These are two of these rules, and I find myself breaking both of them. Firstly, I spend 2-4 hours a day studying in anki, and what might be a surprise to some, I really like it. “Feeding” the software with new material each day, and gradually eating away is just satisfying to me, and I love the way that I can see my progress and my stack getting bigger. Secondly I learn all my new vocabulary with anki, and yes, sure it's hard, but at my level (where I cannot benefit from Krashen's fore-mentioned N+1 theory) I cannot imagine another way of learning that would be less difficult. When I first add a card, I might fail it 10-20 times in a day if it is difficult, but it doesn't matter. After letting my brain bake for the night, I usually get the card right in 3-5 attempts, and on the third day, I start remembering. There is no doubt that anki gets tedious if I spend hours just repeating the same cards that I constantly fail. The remedy to this is keeping the new cards ratio as low as is needed for the study session to be “varied”. (I put the citation-marks to not scare those that might prefer less “boring” approaches.. There I did it again.) Another great solution that I have to keeping my anki'ing varied, is studying all my languages at the same time. So even though Arabic is my main focus, cards in German, French and Algerian Arabic pop up in between. I even added Spanish to the mix just recently, just for the sake of variation, and even though all these are of lower priority to me, I am gradually developing a basis in these languages as a bi-product of my studies in Arabic. (Except for French, which I already know) Oh, and by the way, I recently added subs2srs decks in Spanish and German, so the adding of these “variation filler cards” goes on quite effortlessly. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| emk Diglot Moderator United States Joined 5328 days ago 2615 posts - 8806 votes Speaks: English*, FrenchB2 Studies: Spanish, Ancient Egyptian Personal Language Map | Message 6 of 6 16 August 2014 at 11:48pm | IP Logged | |||||
Yeah, sometimes it's hard to find good resources. My personal strategy goes something like: 1. Do everything I can to artificially boost my comprehension. 2. Once I succeed in mostly deciphering difficult materials, try to reuse them several times, via SRS or rereading/rewatching. 3. Try really hard to find easier materials and use those instead.
Well, there's a big split in how people use Anki. Let me over-generalize and stereotype ridiculously. :-) Flashcard-style: Some people use Anki to memorize isolated vocabulary words, often taken from a frequency list or a publicly available deck. More often than not, these folks are extremely reluctant to delete cards. Content-style: These folks tend to use Anki as a way to review larger chunks of content. They often use "comprehension" cards or fill-in-the-blank cards. They're often more willing to delete bad or frustrating cards, because if they can't learn a word from one context, it's obvious that the will appear in another context soon enough. A lot of the traditional Anki advice applies to the "flashcard-style" folks, because they're the ones who often turn Anki into an incredibly efficient torture machine. The "content-style" folks, however, can get away with certain things. For example, it's perfectly possible to learn new content inside Anki—I've actually "watched" parts of movies using a subs2srs deck, and it's lots of fun. The only piece of critical advice for the "content-style" folks is to delete delete delete whenever a card makes them say, "Oh, yuck, not that thing again." Unfortunately, I discovered subs2srs once I had a pretty good comprehension of French. So to use it effectively, I need to pick out hard content, and it's often easier to to just pick out i+1 content and watch it extensively, because there's a huge amount of i+1 out there for me right now—I just turn on the TV and watch. If I ever get around to learning Spanish, I'd love to try heavy subs2srs from day 1. I have lots of reasons to believe it should be both fun and effective. But for now, you're one of the first people at HTLAL to use subs2srs very heavily and very early in the process. I'm delighted to hear that you're having fun and that things are working out for you. My gut feeling: As long as you're having fun, and you feel like you're making progress, you shouldn't worry. But if you start getting stressed about Anki, don't hesitate to try something new or ask us for advice! And if things do continue to work out well, and you reach a decent intermediate level, please strongly consider writing up a report and sharing your results with the rest of us. :-) Edited by emk on 16 August 2014 at 11:48pm 3 persons have voted this message useful |
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