Comments on: Free and easy audio flashcards for Chinese dictation practice with Anki

By: Olle Linge

Olle Linge — Sat, 10 Jun 2023 08:00:25 +0000

I’ve now bumped the priority a bit! I can’t promise when I will have time to do it, but it could be sooner rather than later!

By: Frank

Frank — Sat, 10 Jun 2023 06:12:08 +0000

Hi Olle,
thanks for the insights.
What is the status of your plans for relaunch of your article?
Frank

By: Olle Linge

Olle Linge — Sat, 29 Apr 2023 12:58:17 +0000

In reply to Gregor. Hi Gregor! So happy to hear it worked out for you! This article is actually very high on my list of articles to rewrite, mostly because the TTS is so much better these days. If you did this recently in Anki, did you notice anything you think I should keep in mind when rewriting the article? Any other experiences or thoughts you think would be worth bringing up? Thanks!

By: Gregor

Gregor — Sat, 29 Apr 2023 08:40:16 +0000

This article is REALLY REALLY REALLY AMAZING I wasted so many hours with making flash cards, having a bad design, then being unmotivated and not reviewing, and finally giving up on them With this setup I finally see the light and made flashcards work for me Thanks so much Olle, going to sign up for the pronunciation course next when it's available again

By: Olle Linge

Olle Linge — Tue, 09 Mar 2021 19:08:11 +0000

In reply to Michal.

Yes, the whole purpose of this type of setup is to practise recognition (that’s implied by dictation practice, after all). Personally, I have never relied heavily on flashcards for speaking. I’ve found it much more valuable to focus on input. When I do want to focus on speaking, which is only for specific words or phrases, I think cloze deletion usually works best. I doubt there is an ideal/best template to use, it all depends. If you want to reverse the order of the cards, that can be done very easily, provided you know the basics of Anki, just create another card template that changes what’s put on the front/back of the flashcards! You can find more info here: https://apps.ankiweb.net/docs/manual20.html#cards-and-templates

By: Michal

Michal — Tue, 09 Mar 2021 09:52:37 +0000

That’s a great article. I do have one problem though. This type of Anki set up only helps us to improve our recognition, but what about recall? Is there a way to reverse the cards using Chinese Support Redux? What is the best way, the best template to learn Chinese characters/words?

By: Olle Linge

Olle Linge — Thu, 21 Jan 2021 11:07:56 +0000

In reply to 武文山. Thank you for your comment! Yes, this definitely needs an update. Development in TTS is pretty fast, and even if everything doesn't trickle down to free flashcard apps like Anki, a lot has happened since this was published. I'll see if I can write an update soon. I still don't think synthesised audio is good enough for pronunciation practice, but it does work well for listening practice in general and is certainly better than nothing.

By: 武文山

武文山 — Thu, 21 Jan 2021 00:57:51 +0000

This is a good article and I’m a big fan of audio flashcards, but it might be worth updating it to take into account changes in the relevant software. AwesomeTTS has gone through a lot of changes and now supports more voices, with some additional complications such as requiring an API key, Anki now supports TTS out of the box, at least for system voices, but most notable is recent introduction of Azure’s neural voices, which are significantly more natural than any others supported by AwesomeTTS or Anki. They are close to the point of being able to generate whole sentences naturally, and frankly anyone using TTS to generate audio for their cards should look at switching over to them.

By: Olle Linge

Olle Linge — Thu, 07 Jan 2021 08:36:20 +0000

In reply to 山姆. Thanks for sharing! I haven't looked into this at all, but does it only affect Google's TTS? Last time I checked I thought the Baidu one worked better, but maybe all the TTS engines are affected?

By: 山姆

山姆 — Thu, 07 Jan 2021 04:48:00 +0000

Note that the Redux Add-On is broken at the moment.

There’s a work-around: https://github.com/luoliyan/chinese-support-redux/issues/169

Sadly, it looks like the owners of the add-on are being quite slow to accept contributions from the community, but hopefully it doesn’t kill the add-on.

If you do end up using the work-around, but you still don’t hear any google audio for some of your notes (created before applying the work-around), you might need to manually delete the empty audio files associated with these notes