ShareX - amazing

[Flickserve]

Searching on the forum hasn't shown any mentions of this software.

 

I only recently got to know of it and have been playing with it the last couple of days. It can put your collection of sentences plus audio on steroids. Well, that's a bit of over exaggeration but sort of the same.

 

The download is fairly painless but the setup takes a little bit of time. I followed a guide here to going through the settings. Basically I spent a couple of hours with the setup and experimenting with it.

 

https://youtu.be/IS7WzYICAsk

 

 

The software allows you to grab audio and screenshots which can be directly moved into the relevant field in an anki card. There's also an OCR function for Chinese characters (I have only used it for simplified characters). 

 

For example, I am watching a TV drama (正阳门下）on YouTube at the moment and grabbed an audio clip of a single sentence from YouTube without having to rip the audio separately. I then used the OCR to pull the Chinese sentence out. The OCR isn't perfect - it depends on the complexity of the character and the background. I first copied and pasted the OCR text into anki. I wrote the missing character in pleco to check the pinyin, then I used the win10 pinyin to type the correct character. 

 

The audio file can also be manipulated in audacity. If you grabbed too much audio and want to isolate a certain segment, then use audacity. I grabbed a whole segment and cut it down to an individual segment. 

 

I sent the audio file to an online tutor and we worked on it. She explained some of the sentence structure which had puzzled me. Also we discussed the audio but it wasn't really in the scope of the lesson to discuss it and passed it over.

 

After the lesson and having listened about 50 times, I still couldn't work out the relationship between what the actor said and the text. I decided to do a blind test. I played the sentence on a speaker and recorded it into hellotalk. I specifically asked some Beijingers by direct message to write out the sentence. All three got it right. Being a bit flabbergasted, I went back into audacity and put the troublesome segment on a loop. After another endless number of repetitions, I started hearing how the actor had slurred his speech. 

 

The good thing about SpaceX is grabbing the sentence audio together with the text. It's much more convenient to share questions that you have. The bad thing is, although much more convenient, your learning ability is still limited by your own brain. ?

 

Edit: A screen capture and audio file without manipulation

 

 

 

Q6A9TJeQgR.mp3

[Tomsima]

This is a phenomenal resource, thanks for sharing. Matt's recommendations are also second to none as usual - i've used his retirement add-on for anki since he released it and its helped me lean down my anki hours to the point where I'm only working on the most recent vocab (within the last month). The fear of forgetting actually seems to drive me to read more in order to try and make up for not having SRS - strange, I suppose the system was designed for the opposite reason.

 

Anyway, this makes things so much simpler for me to get audio into anki. Previously I would use WASAPI on audacity, but half the time couldnt be bothered anyway. Now the audio is straight into a card, much more likely I'm gonna be improving my listening and speaking through this kind of audio-centred review now.