With the audio material I am listening to, I have played with the idea of putting runs of silence between the sentences, in the recording, so I can repeat what I have just heard. I think it has been working - things stick better when using this method. But I'm not at all sure that it is worth the time it takes for me to open the mp3's in audactiy and but the gaps in. There was a thread where someone discussed an automated method of cutting an audio file into chunks by searching for the spaces between sentences. Does anyone know where that was or if the method could be adapted to do what I want. Are there other tools that could make the process more efficient for me? I don't want to create srs material - I have enough of that to be going on with and I can't use it while doing other activities. Does anyone have any clever ideas?

Keep doing what you're doing with audacity. It's a good idea. The editing process eats up a lot of time but it leaves you with a better study product.

can't you just use the pause button on your mp3 player? Or try to say things at the same as the recording? Editing individual sound files or even doing it by some batch process sounds like more hassle than it's worth.

I'm not sure this would work, but...
You said you didn't want SRS material. That's fine, it's not what I'm suggesting, so stick with me:

subs2srs but without SRSing. It'll cut up the audio for you, and you just have to hit the spacebar when you want to move to the next line! You don't have to SRS it if you don't want to.

Or you could just watch it normally and hit space to pause it after lines you want to shadow.

I think audacity can find the gaps and split the file by them. I think you can then re-join the files with more gap between the pieces.

And actually, I think I'll do that with my Shadowing audio to give me more time to say it. Thanks for the idea!

Do this (courtesy of ryuukohito):

"1. Load the audiobook mp3/wave file in Audacity.

2. Select all (keyboard shortcut: CTRL-A) or a portion of the audiobook section.

3. Click Analyze, and select Silence Finder. (This feature will analyze portions of audio demarcated by silence, and it will label them accordingly. At this point, it is immensely helpful if the audiofile you are using has only the narrator/storyteller speaking at all times, with no accompanying background music.)

4. I have found a useful generic setting for almost all of my audio files to be this: 


Silence Level: 15 (dB)

Minimum silence duration: 0.5 (seconds)
Place label: 0.30 (seconds)



(Adjust accordingly. A brief explanation of the above things:

The 'silence level' determines the minimum 'volume' of silence a portion of audio has to be at before it is considered 'silent', and is made as a marking point. Hence, if there is noise, or background music, in the audio, consider raising this value.

The 'minimum silence duration' is the minimum length between two points in an audio file where there is silence. Hence, if the speech going back and forth, or narration between two sentences, is too fast, consider decreasing this value.

The 'place label' determines how much space, in seconds, is placed in front of each labelled audio portion.)



4. If all goes well, you will now see a new 'track' appear. Check if everything is right, by pressing the CTRL key and scrolling with your mouse scroll-button to zoom in.

5. If the audio portions have all been correctly 'labelled' (and split), click File -> Export Multiple. Select your export format, and adjust the export directory and naming settings, then click Export.

6. What happens is that the audio will then be split accordingly into many various sections, usually each a chunk of 1-5 seconds long. (All silence in between have been removed, so you get chunks of pure audio data only.)



You can then load these mp3s in your favourite media player (Winamp, Foobar, Windows Media Player, VLC, et cetera, although I prefer the last because it makes it really easy for me to loop one particular chunk endlessly) and choose to focus on and repeat/shadow only the particular chunk of audio you fancy at that time, to practice intonation, pitch, melody, and whatever other colourations of speech as need be. (This avoids you having to waste time selecting manually the portion of speech you need to practice in Audacity.)" (This ends ryuukohito's quote)

And now it's me talking:
I use this every day, and it works amazingly well. You get each sentence separately and you can put in on loop and just pause when you want to say something. Or you can do shadowing with each single sentence. The whole process takes a few seconds and you're ready to go. The best thing ever!

The best thing is to use the method of truando to split your mp3s into separate sentences, then use Audio Lesson Studio to insert runs of silence between the sentences automatically with the same length of the sentences.

Thanks everyone,
Dear Truando - what you suggested is simple and quick and chops the files up perfectly - BUT - is there
1. a way to stitch them back together again with silences in between ?
2. or to not slice them in the first place, but to use the labels to insert eg 2 sec of silence after each sentence, ending up with one long track ?
I spent a whole 5 minutes looking through the menus/help files, and may have to do that properly, but it seems more efficient to ask here first.
The reason I don't want to press the pause button after each sentence is that I might be doing the dishes, weeding the garden etc. When I am at the computer I like to use anki/SRS but I don't want to spend too much time there.
Making a play list with lots of a silent tracks sounds too messy.
I haven't looked into the sub2SRS option yet because I am, at this stage, even less familiar with that program.
It looks like it will be do-able - Thanks for any help.

Ah! I just saw ahibba's post - I'll look into it. Before looking at Audio Lesson Studio, I am still wishing it could be done in one place/program, because if I am able to do it quickly, I will probably do it often.

ahibba Wrote:The best thing is to use the method of truando to split your mp3s into separate sentences, then use Audio Lesson Studio to insert runs of silence between the sentences automatically with the same length of the sentences.

That's sounds like a good idea, but I think I'd want the silence to be 1.5-2x the length of the audio, since I'm learning and will make mistakes... And probably talk slower.

just going by the title of the thread:
post on making audio files from any drama/anime/etc with subtitle file using sub2srs:
http://forum.koohii.com/showthread.php?tid=2576&page=3

I've managed to turn up a partial solution.

As I understand it, you want the silence to be 1.5 or 2 times the length of what was said before it. I can't find any tool that will analyse each part and insert the necessary silence. But, I did find this thread - http://forum.audacityteam.org/viewtopic....23&start=0 - which resulted in one kind user adapting the Silence Finder function into a silence insertion plug-in. It works exactly the same way except for adjusting how much silence to insert at each point, instead of defining the Place Label.

I've tried it out and it works just about OK. It will spit out an error if you don't convert your audio to mono first (found in the 'Tracks' menu). It will also fail if you run out memory; I had to close down all my other programs before it would work properly.

Download, unzip and drop the plug-in into the Audacity plug-ins directory.
Open up your audio file and convert it to mono (Tracks menu).
Select your track and then open up the Silence Lengthen plug-in from the Effects menu.
You will then need to judge how much silence to drop in. The track I tried it out with had very regular pauses and I found a 2-3 second silence worked well. Of course it is going to vary depending on the content, and a combination of long and short sentences is going to make it difficult to get a good balance. Even so, I think this could be a really useful tool...

Brilliant - does what I need and saves me so much time. I think I can easily live with the fixed length silences. People here can be so helpful. I will also look at Audio Lesson Studio sometime soon as it does sound interesting.

What worked for me is, endless listening to something you understand(basically listen to the same thing over and over again, trust me it helps when you check the same audio a few months later). So you can gain more through context listening then just random ones. But I've just listened,srs vocab by frequency, add it to my srs deck and I'm good. Basically common ones and eventually you'll gain a huge boost in listening.

Interesting idea. I often mine anime as I have exact subs thanks to having cable and a DVD recorder in japan. I could probably mine individual words using this tool. Hence, audio sentence + audio vocab word card. Might be cool add on to an clozed delete audio card!

I'd say the best way to listen more effectively is to just listen MORE.

Watch more Japanese TV, keep the Japanese radio going, podcasts, etc... Getting your brain used to constant, full-speed Japanese conversation takes a while but it does happen if the amount is enough and sustained for long enough...

it's really simple, listen me/srs/follow transcripts and keep listening more.

(Please right-click -->

and select "open new window" for a bit of background music for this post - just to get the right feel!)

I'm sorta with TA12121 on this one. Comprehensible listening from day 1 is by far the most important thing in improving auditory vocabulary, audio grammar recognition, hearing skills, listening comprehension. I'm starting to see that with few exceptions that ensuring you really understand your content rather than mass listening to just about everything is the key. I think if I had truly understood this 12 months ago, I would be nearer to where TA12121 is right now in terms of listening skills (as an example) rather than perhaps 50% of.

Things you can do (the short list):
# Get audio for your cards. One of my friends is going to read my vocabulary list out for me. 1 file, audicity cuts it up, I cut and paste it in. Easy.
# Build a library of re-listening material that grows with you as you learn. Start out with simple stuff like the Anime episode of whatever Manga you are reading and move up to FNN news as you get better (moving through songs, anime, dramas, variety shows, and so on in between.)
# Relisten. Do the above and just go over and over the same stuff with perhaps a non-study playlist for times you are feeling overwhelmed, but always go back to your content.
# Finally, if you want to truly be able to understand when it is said to you - SUBS2SRS. Relistening and reviewing at it's highest level is done through this program and some serious motivation (I am currently doing Naruto 115. It's grunt work as I have to type it all in, but that's 20 minutes of content for maybe 1 1/2 hours work, which will get quite a bit of replay time [as I'll get the audio from the video as well and relisten to that.])

If I had only done these 3 things when I started out, I truly feel I would be walking tall now rather than feeling a bit down on myself for being silly in the beginning. (Time to make the next twelve months a solid success - much like Rocky.)

Be sure to be able to understand Japanese audio by itself. No subtitles, I've found out that there is a huge difference between understanding Japanese by itself then following subs(english) and even j-subs. But using J-subs to your advantage you can speed up the process of improving your listening skills.

I'm glad I worked on my reading/listening skills in the begining then output skills. Because now I have a strong foundation for practicing speaking/writing.

With the way I'm going I expect to be fluent in 4 years and be happy with my fluency(urgh I hate when I set high expectations for myself)

One thing I should say is, enjoy what your doing. Don't worry if your not at the level you are, I never feel if I'm fluent or awesome yet in Japanese. But a lot of people say I already am, this tells me I set my expectations too high.

So relax,enjoy and have fun.

ta12121 Wrote:One thing I should say is, enjoy what your doing. Don't worry if your not at the level you are, I never feel if I'm fluent or awesome yet in Japanese. But a lot of people say I already am, this tells me I set my expectations too high.

So relax,enjoy and have fun.

If you set your expectations high, then you probably see yourself using that knowledge in the future, right?

As for me, I study languages only as much as I need to study to do some things that I want to do.

My English is probably advanced or something(?), but I still suck a lot. However I have no things that I want to do that I can't do in English, so I don't see any reason why I should study specifically English. There are lots of other things to spend my time on.

I mean I am at a level at which I can pick up basically any book and I have potential to learn to eventually understand it quite fast...I see no reason in studying facts that I never use. Things like books on Japanese traditional architecture have a lot of new words, but hey, I wouldn't even understand those words in my native language, so I think I should only learn words that I will really need. Time is precious. Time is limited.

I can speak native-level Russian,but I have never read even a children's book. But I have never had problems with it nor have I felt that I should. Just had no reason to do that.
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No thing that is Fun + beneficial is worthless.

Consider it like this: If you died tomorrow, would you feel that you spent your time on the wrong things?
For example if you could choose to spend your last 10 days of life doing different things, would you do it?

Anyway one thing is for sure...if you are working really hard towards your goal and you fail, then you can at least say it was fun...and thus it wasn't time wasted.

In this case, no matter what happens you win.

I don't think I'll fail, I've gotten so far that it would be a waste. I say it was all worth it, it has been fun as well as painful at times. But I've learned you gotta have fun with what you do.

But I've learned that there will be always things we don't know. Whenever I read English novels there are things that I don't know/wouldn't know. So this tells me, operating in a English to 95%+ is probably fluent enough. There will always be that other 5% that makes up words/things you don't know.

Does anyone have any uploaded decks with audio? For example movies like 時をかける少女 and drama? I think I'll leech off some of these before I try my own. XD

http://learnanylanguage.wikia.com/wiki/Sub2srs_decks

Seems to be a good tool but unfortunately I do not get fully the hang of how to use it. Currently I am working with a slightly modified core6k anki deck file (I have it on my pc and created a smaller file, only containing the sentences, vocabularies and so on, for N3, to make it faster). Now I would like to put all the audio together I had already (is that possible?), or if that is not possible, just randomly all the audio. How do I do that? Just adding the whole .media *.mp3 files of the deck in Audio Lesson Studio?? Please help! My listening skills are really bad T_T

Anyone know an easy way to get them into anki? I'm looking for an easier solution than drag and drop