Flashcards using sentences with audio

[chinopinyin]

http://tatoeba.org/eng/ is a multilingual sentence database. Currently, they have over 16 000 sentences in chinese and close to 1700 of them have audio by native speakers http://tatoeba.org/eng/sentences/with_audio/cmn. Data can be downloaded from http://tatoeba.org/eng/download_tatoeba_example_sentences

I wonder if there is a simple way of getting this gem into anki, probably the best SRS program available

For tatoeba developers or any programmer this should be a piece of cake and many people are going to find this extremely useful

[Baudelaire]

Hi, I'm the main developper of Tatoeba, yup I can do that. Tough I'm a little busy with doing the brand new version of Tatoeba (in c++, API, real time search engine, and much more stay tuned) and a tatoeba-like dictionnary website , I think I can do that kind of deck and then put it on my server. Please drop me a message at allan.simon [at] supinfo [dot] com so that I will not forget it. Btw next time you can directly ask us The only reason we're making tatoeba, as we don't earn any money on it, is the pleasure to know we're making things useful for language learners (as anyway we're also are so we're helping ourselves in the mean time:p). So feel free to give us any kind of ideas (even the craziest ones) you have, otherwise I'm not able to state if they're actually to much crazy/hard to do. Btw thanks for your interest in tatoeba.

[chinopinyin]

Thanks a lot for your offer to build a chinese anki deck with audio using Tatoeba. I'll drop you a message so that you'll remember and will also post a message in the Tatoeba wall.

[Baudelaire]

I was Ill to death this last days so I've only made it today

So now the deck is available on the normal "file->download->shared deck" menu of anki (the title is "Tatoeba chinese-english deck with audio and pinyin")

I've made it with 4 fields

1 - chinese sentence

2 - audio of the chinese sentence

3 - all English translations (NOTE: some of them may be what we call on tatoeba "indirect translations" which means translations of translations, for example the Chinese sentence has been translated into spanish , and then the spanish has been tranlated into English, so in each group, if one English sentences has a slightly different meaning it's "normal", tough you can tell me there about this, so I will remove them from the deck to improve its quality)

4 - pinyin

I've put them in separated fields so that if someone wants to put pinyin and chinese together / don't want to display pinyin etc. etc., you can just by editing which fields anki will choose (I let you read the documentation of anki for more precision)

If you have any remarks/ suggestion, feel free to post them here

[chinopinyin]

This is excellent news!!! and you've been so quick in answering my request!!!

Having an anki deck with over 1600 sentences with chinese audio is truly awesome. I've just started to explore it and will let you know if I have some comments. Having separate fields is clearly a good idea.

I have one additional suggestion: Make a HUGE chinese english deck with pinyin (this one without audio) to complement the previous one. In this new deck, I would employ all chinese sentences in Tatoeba that have a direct English translation (Most likely over 10 000 sentences)

PS Glad to hear that you are no longer ill

[Gleaves]

Thanks, Baudelaire. I will check it out as well.

[Baudelaire]

Ok i will try to do that, BTW I can also do chinese->(French/German/Spanish) (pick up on) if someone wants. As a French native, I know I would prefer a deck in my mother tongue, so don't hesitate to ask, now I know the step to generate a deck from tatoeba, so I should be easier to generate other deck.

BTW now I think about it, I could also add a traditional field (as anyway for the deck with all Chinese sentences it will be require, as a enough important part of them has been added by a someone from HongKong, so in traditional script, so it can "trouble" (don't know if it's the right verb:p) someone who only knows simplified script)

[BWW]

Hi, Tatoeba is an absolutely awesome site! I am working on a site (www.memrise.com) using various memory techniques to help people learn languages (especially Chinese characters) through the application of various memory techniques etc. It is currently totally free to use, not sure what we will do in the future. I would love to talk with you about how we could integrate your sentences etc. Please do get in touch with me, ben@memrise.com.

Best wishes,

Ben

[chinopinyin]

Baudelaire, it would be great to have a Chinese Spanish deck as well

Adding a field with traditional script would also be a vey good idea.

[Baudelaire]

@Chinopinyin

Sorry for the delay, but these days I was busy so didn't find time to generate the decks,

for a Chinese with audio-Spanish deck, for the moment it's maybe not interesting, because even by taking indirect spanish translations, we reach only 400 cards, of course as you're a contributor of tatoeba, you can help change it, by focusing on translating these sentences by using this page Chinese sentences with audio not directly translated into Spanish (btw thanks for all the sentneces you've already added in Spanish )

The Chinese with audio- French will be soon available (there's 1450 sentences)

I will also generate

Chinese - English

Chinese - French

Chinese - Spanish

with following fields

Simplified

Traditional

Pinyin

Chinese audio (if available)

Id in tatoeba (so if there's a mistake, one will be able to correct it or at least ask for someone to correct it)

Other language (either English/French/Spanish)

If people have other request, feel free to tell them here

[Baudelaire]

I've just uploaded the Chinese with audio / French decks

[chinopinyin]

Thanks Baudelaire for uploading a Chinese French anki deck with audio.

For Spanish, you point out that there are only 400 cards (I've tried to increase this number in the last couple of days, so there are probably around 500 sentences now). But even a deck with 400 cards is useful. One thing that could be done would be to produce a Chinese Spanish deck by the end of the month and then, perhaps next year, update all Tatoeba chinese decks. My impression is that the Tatoeba corpus is growing quite rapidly so the updated decks would be much bigger.

Thanks again for the good work

[student]

I've downloaded and installed anki on my computer (running win 7) and have downloaded the "Tatoeba chinese-english deck with audio and pinyin". It all works well, except the audio!

I see in the notes on the download that "An archive with all audios can be downloaded here http://sysko.fr/anki_audio/cmn.tar.gz" I've downloaded this but am not sure what to do with it.

Any assistance would be much appreciated!

[scoff]

@Baudelaire

Thank you so much for the Chinese-English deck with audio. It's awesome.

Two Requests:

1. English-Chinese deck for our Chinese friends
   
2. The large Chinese-English deck you mentioned with and without audio (when you get a chance )
   

[Baudelaire]

@scoff do you have the same problem than user "student" ?

good idea for the other side (english-chinese) , for the "not only audio " chinese deck , I'm waiting the number of chinese sentence to reach 20 000 (which will happen tomorow or even tonight )

@student I will try to test it on an other computer. can you try to put "http://sysko.fr/anki_audio/" as the media path in anki option and tell me if it change something (actually audio are supposed to be read from there, as it's my personnal server, but seems it's not exported, I will try to see if I'm doing wrong, or if it's an issue with anki

[scoff]

I've downloaded and installed anki on my computer (running win 7) and have downloaded the "Tatoeba chinese-english deck with audio and pinyin". It all works well, except the audio!

I see in the notes on the download that "An archive with all audios can be downloaded here http://sysko.fr/anki_audio/cmn.tar.gz" I've downloaded this but am not sure what to do with it.

Any assistance would be much appreciated!

This is the procedure that worked for me:

1. Untar (extract) the audio folder using your favorite program. I like peazip.
   
2. Copy all the audio files into anki's media folder. AFAIK the default is anki's installation folder, which for most of us is probably some variation on C:\Program Files\Anki or C:\Program Files (x86)\Anki
   
3. (Re)Start Anki and load the tatoeba chinese-english deck
   
4. Study with audio!
   

[chinopinyin]

You may also use 7zip to extract the audio files in http://sysko.fr/anki_audio/cmn.tar.gz

What I did was to copy the extracted mp3 files in a subdirectory named Tatoeba chinese-english deck with audio .media and then everythng worked

[Baudelaire]

ok thanks for explaining, though i think the remote media path should be exported too when I export my deck (as for my part I've only the audio on my server, which is convenient if you use ankidroid or so)

By the way if someone for some reason (linux etc.) would prefer an other format (ogg for example), I can also do it (as I have the original wav file, so it would produce a better quality rather than trying to convert from mp3 to ogg)

[wezel]

Hello - Would someone mind taking me through a step by step means of getting the audio into Anki. I've read all the posts and nothing I do has worked. Tried it on a computer with Windows XP Pro, Windows VISTA and an older Mac with 10.4 with no results. I can't find AFAIK, and I can't figure out which is supposed to the media folder in Anki either. It may be I'm just pressing the wrong button on Anki too but if it's not the REPEAT AUDIO button, not sure what it could be.

Alternately, what would be quite useful on the Tatoeba website is if there were an easy way to look at the translations for the Chinese. i.e. directly underneath the Chinese sentence. Right now, it is a couple of clicks away and then one has to find the English and then somehow try to figure out how to get back to the page where all the Chinese lines and audio are.

As you can see, I am not particularly adept with computers but suspect there may be more like me around.

Thanks!

[scoff]

@Baudelaire

Did you ever get around to making those other decks? If not, could you post instructions on how you created each deck?

I'm getting ready to make the attempt, but it would be nice to hear from someone who has already been successful.