I've been looking over some of the lists on smart.fm and it looks like the "Mastering Chinese Characters" and "Modern China: The Media" series are great courses to followup RTH (plus whatever other character learning you do, or RTH 2 when it comes out).

The MCC course is about character recognition, but if you import only the sentences into Anki you'll learn some great vocab, and the sentences start really simple and build from there (I didn't see anything too awfully challenging in there). The course covers 2700 characters and has 3550 sentences, all with audio.

The MCTM course starts at a low intermediate level with the aim of getting you to understand news and other media. So I guess it's primarily for understanding written and formal spoken Chinese, although the first 3 lists (of 5) say that the vocab contained in them is common in casual conversation. The 4th and 5th lists are more technical and specialized, "specifically related to news and society." It has 1220 vocab items and 2433 sentences, all with audio.

This seems to me like a fantastic way to continue after finishing RTH.

I've been importing all the lists into Anki. I'll share both decks once I'm done (sometime tomorrow).

I'm having some trouble importing the first list from the MCC series. I've tried a couple others with no problem, so maybe it's something wrong with that list. I'm going through it and doing it manually, but it's going to take a while.

Anyway, here's the Anki deck and media folder for the Chinese Media course.

I finally finished putting Level 1 together imported the other levels. Unfortunately, I forgot to make both card templates in Anki before importing the Level 1 stuff, so the Reading cards all came first and then the Listening cards after. This means you'd have to go through all the Reading cards first before you start on the Listening cards. To get around having to do that, I ended up making 3 different decks. One with Level 1 Reading cards, one with Level 1 Listening cards, and one with both types of cards containing Levels 2-10.

It's not the ideal solution, but I'm not about to go through all that work again to get it in the right order. Fortunately using multiple decks is easier with the newest version of Anki (with the deck browser), so it will do. I don't know why you can't export cards in order to a text file. It seems like that would be a really easy fix, but oh well. I'll be uploading the decks soon.

OK, here are all of the files.

http://www.mediafire.com/?sharekey=7f342...b5aa27078d

Mastering Chinese Characters 2-10 a&b are the audio files for the MCC 2-10 deck. The Mastering Chinese Characters 1 zip file is both decks (reading cards and listening cards) plus the audio. And the Chinese Media zip file contains the whole Chinese Media course.

The MCC course is a total of 3535 sentences after omitting the few (15) duplicates. They start fairly simple (我是老師, 我愛你, 你好, 他是我的哥哥, and 她是我的女兒 are the first 5 sentences). With a dictionary or something like MDBG.net a beginner should have no problem working through it. The audio is good quality and spoken very clearly.

The Chinese Media course is a little more advanced but I have a feeling that after finishing the MCC course it will be a good way to continue. I'll comment on that when I get to it. The deck has 2433 sentences.

So that's a total of 5968 sentences here. Since there are both listening and reading cards for both courses, the total number of cards is 11,936. It may be a little much, but I can just delete what isn't useful to me as I go along. If I go at a rate of 35 sentences per day, that's a little less than 6 months of work to get to what seems a fairly high level of proficiency.

I honestly probably won't be going at that rate since I'll most likely be starting on Japanese this fall (going back to school for a degree in Chinese with a minor in Japanese so I can move on to grad work in Chinese linguistics). But if I end up starting Japanese in the Spring instead, I think this will get me to a pretty high level in Chinese by that time.

Any thoughts about this are welcome. Hopefully it will be helpful to someone else too!

Wow ...

Very nice!

I'm not even sure how the heck you did that. Smart.fm seems to be a bit over my head. Is there some mechanism I'm not seeing for mass copying, or did you just slug your way through all that?

Ha! Yeah it actually was a pretty decent amount of work. Mastering Chinese Characters Level 1 wasn't working with Anki's importer plugin so I did have to do that manually. It was maybe 4 or 5 hours of work. Levels 2-10 and the Chinese Media series were easy. All I had to do was click import and paste the url of the list.

Anki has an Smart.Fm importer plugin. Just go to Download-->Shared Plugin and it's there (currently 2nd on the list). The Pinyin Toolkit plugin is handy too (it's how I made the deck in the "Hanzi beyond RTH" thread).

This is REALLY, really nice!

I had no idea that smart.fm was so useful. I had always looked at it as a FlashcardExchange.com clone with a prettier interface. I stand corrected. I stand corrected AND awestruck at the potential.

And the funny thing is that I took an immediate dislike to the LISTEN. format -- but it grew on me almost as quickly. I certainly need practice in that arena.

ANKIphiles reading this should download bflatnine's files.

FuDaWei Wrote:I had no idea that smart.fm was so useful. I had always looked at it as a FlashcardExchange.com clone with a prettier interface. I stand corrected. I stand corrected AND awestruck at the potential.

I thought the same thing until just a few days ago! Then I noticed how much people on this site talk about it so I figured I'd look into it more. I was really impressed by the potential of the site. Unfortunately, there's just not a ton of content for Chinese yet, but what is there is really cool. For example, they have a course that has all the vocab for Integrated Chinese, with example sentences for each word. Really cool, if you're studying IC.

I wish there was one for Practical Chinese Reader, since that's what they use at the university I'll be going to and I could use it to brush up (esp book 2). Oh well. Looks like I'll be old-schooling it through that book.

I'm glad the decks are useful!

I'd really love to play with the smart.fm plugin today, but there is evidently a bug that crept into the latest ANKI release, preventing access to "Deck Properties" in certain cases.

Arrggghh!!

Yeah I used 0.9.9.8.2 for about 5 minutes before going back to 0.9.9.8.1 because it was so buggy. Looks like 0.9.9.8.3 is out now so maybe I'll give that one a shot.

bflatnine Wrote:Looks like 0.9.9.8.3 is out now so maybe I'll give that one a shot.

NOOOO-ooo-ooooo!!!

THAT's the one with the bug.

(He's aware of it and will have a new update in a few hours.)

Oh! Well I didn't like 0.9.8.8.2 either. Ha!

I guess I'll wait a while.