Can someone direct me to a shared Mandarin anki deck or spreadsheet that is roughly
equivalent to Core 2000 for Japanese? All I'm looking for are
2000-3000 sentences using the highest frequency characters/words. If
it makes a difference, I plan to do Mandarin to English only. The
format should be
Question: Mandarin
Answer: English & Pinyin

leosmith Wrote:Can someone direct me to a shared Mandarin anki deck or spreadsheet that is roughly
equivalent to Core 2000 for Japanese? All I'm looking for are
2000-3000 sentences using the highest frequency characters/words. If
it makes a difference, I plan to do Mandarin to English only. The
format should be
Question: Mandarin
Answer: English & Pinyin

There is the Zhongwenredcomplete deck for example. I am not entirely sure there was a strict frequency prioritisation though.

I've downloaded the full core 2000 + 6000 chinese decks before iKnow turned into a pay site. Think it was based on frequency?

The sentences are ok, but the basic vocab decks are rubbish, as they just contain single characters, no compounds. The more advanced "news vocab" course has more interesting words.

Can upload the raw deck easily, no sure about the audio (it's quite big). Also everything is in traditional and simplified formats, but the anki downloader couldn't handle it properly - so these are contained in 1 field. I need to do some additional formatting to separate them.

Gents,
Those decks sound great, but I don't see them in the shared anki decks. Any way I can get my hands on them?
Thanks,
Leo

I know that chineseclass101 has a core 2000 list too, and it looks like it has short phrases/example sentences for most of the words. Maybe there is a way to export it? You can sign up for a free 7 day trial and try to grab the data. I'm only on the free trial now and I haven't used much of it. I have no idea how good it is but might be worth a look.

leosmith Wrote:Gents,
Those decks sound great, but I don't see them in the shared anki decks. Any way I can get my hands on them?
Thanks,
Leo

ZhongwenRedComplete Traditional — ZhongwenRedComplete Simplified. Based on zhongwenred.com.

KanjiDevourer Wrote:

leosmith Wrote:Gents,
Those decks sound great, but I don't see them in the shared anki decks. Any way I can get my hands on them?
Thanks,
Leo

ZhongwenRedComplete Traditional — ZhongwenRedComplete Simplified. Based on zhongwenred.com.

Thanks. I can't get to these in China, so I've posted a request to upload them to shanred anki decks.

Hey got your message; will upload the core decks once I've finished formatting them.

leosmith Wrote:Thanks. I can't get to these in China, so I've posted a request to upload them to shanred anki decks.

Even though these decks are freely available, it's still copyrighted material; therefore sharing them is a legal grey area. This is especially true of the iKnow decks, which were free but are now paid-for material. For this reason, it's probably not appropriate to share them via Anki shared decks.

Could you research what file sharing services are usable in China? I could just email them to you, but would be useful to also put them on here.

aphasiac Wrote:I've downloaded the full core 2000 + 6000 chinese decks before iKnow turned into a pay site. Think it was based on frequency?

Was there a Core 2000 + 6000 for Chinese? I want to get it too!

Quote:Can upload the raw deck easily, no sure about the audio (it's quite big).

The audio makes it even more interesting! I believe audio is very important for Mandarin, so if you are able to upload it somewhere—maybe Wupload (up to 2GB in size for free accounts according to the FAQ), Filesonic or FileServe (up to 1 GB)—, that would be great. If there's something people ask for all the time in these forums is about a Chinese Core, so having a download link would be the definitive answer.

aphasiac Wrote:Could you research what file sharing services are usable in China? I could just email them to you, but would be useful to also put them on here.

If they haven't blocked all the good ones in there...

aphasiac Wrote:Hey got your message; will upload the core decks once I've finished formatting them.

Awesome. I'm eagerly awaiting, whether or not they come with sound.

leosmith Wrote:Could you research what file sharing services are usable in China? I could just email them to you, but would be useful to also put them on here.

Sorry to let you down. My internet went from pretty good to nonexistent to sporadic at best. I'd be glad to try to find out after I leave China.

I would also love to get the Chinese 6k, especially with audio.

Hey guys, sorry for the delay but here they are - FINALLY!

smart.fm Core Chinese Vocab - http://www.megaupload.com/?d=G7O6FT6L
Vocab audio: http://www.megaupload.com/?d=6QBWJ7W9

smart.fm Core Chinese Sentences - http://www.megaupload.com/?d=18V2JVHK
Sentence Audio - http://www.megaupload.com/?d=WESNN7I7

Some notes:

This is the OLD smart.fm Chinese course, downloaded around 1 year ago just before iknow.jp became a pay-site. If you login now, they have a new chinese course, consisting of Core 2000 + 1,233 news items. The news items appear to be unchanged, but the new Core 2000 has been totally re-created with different vocab, example sentences and audio.

There are 2 separate decks; I downloaded it this way because I like to study vocab and sentences separately. Each word in the vocab deck has *at least* one matching sentence in the sentence deck, but there may be more; just search for the word in the deck browser. You can combine the decks if you like, as all items still contain their iknow ID numbers.

Both decks are separated (by tag) into the following steps:

Beginner (1-5)
Intermediate (1-10)
Advanced (1-12)
News (1-12)

Beginner starts off with the total basics ("hello" / "I am a teacher"), advanced contains more difficult concepts ("Lenin's likeness has been made into a statue to enable people to pay tribute to him."). The news items contain more topical news related vocab (e.g. "China implemented the One Child Policy in most areas"). Unfortunately just like the Japanese Core decks, the sentence grammar is pretty basic even at the advanced level, mostly consisting of statements of being (X is/has Y); the news sentences are a bit more varied.

Each step has 100-150 items in it. Some steps are missing items due to downoading errors, also advanced and news sometimes contained duplicate sentences and words which haven't been imported. All facts contain links to images on the iknow site, most of which still seem to work!

The vocab deck contains 3790 facts, the sentence deck has 5354 facts. Not sure why the big difference; I think it's because each vocab item often had more than 1 sentence associated with it?

Each fact has traditional form, simplified form (if different), reading in pinyin, and English translation. Please be aware that with the smart.fm Japanese Core decks, sometime the translations were a bit poor/incomplete..but in this case, this course was introduced after iknow announced they were going commercial, So hopefully they were checked more thoroughly.

In the vocab deck, you can easily re-create the audio using the pinyin toolkit. The sentence audio is pretty good, so recommend you download it.

Phew, audio uploaded! let me know if you have an problems etc.

Very nice, maybe the best shared Anki deck for Mandarin so far! The audio for the sentences is really great as you said. So now we, too, have a Core with audio, pictures and the whole shebang.

Just for fun, I used a script to count the amount of unique hanzi in the sentence deck, and the numbers are: 2,841 for the Traditional field and 2,749 for the Simplified* one.

* After updating the blank ones by copying the sentence from the 'Traditional' field, since the ones I've checked seemed to use the same characters.

Now it's just a matter of using it well and wisely.

Edit: Surprisingly, the links for the images still work.

Just tested by creating a proper card model, and as gdaxeman confirmed, the images still seem to work! So you can add them to your cards if having a picture helps.

Edit: one of the words in the vocab deck is "pornographic" - for giggles, check out the associated picture! Also have a look at "adultery",

edit edit: seeings as the pictures are still there, I wonder if no URLs have changed and if the anki iknow downloader still works? Will investigate..

gdaxeman Wrote:Just for fun, I used a script to count the amount of unique hanzi in the sentence deck, and the numbers are: 2,841 for the Traditional field and 2,749 for the Simplified* one.

Hey nice - so this is kind of a core 3000? The news course description said it's supposed to allow you to read a Chinese newspaper by the end; not sure if 3,700 words is enough for that, but should take you into reading kids books and manga territory. Now i just need to get on and study it...

edit: according to iknow.jp, the characters contained in the "beginners", "intermediate" and "advanced" parts of the course represent over 98% of characters used in newspapers.

aphasiac Wrote:Hey nice - so this is kind of a core 3000? The news course description said it's supposed to allow you to read a Chinese newspaper by the end; not sure if 3,700 words is enough for that, but should take you into reading kids books and manga territory. Now i just need to get on and study it, lol..

It's like a Core 2,750+ Hanzi for the folks! At least one reading for each one of these characters, all of them used in sentences for context.

I don't know about the validity of the 3,700 words number to read a newspaper, but that would be an interestig hypothesis to test. Maybe some additional implicit grammar and sentence structures would be needed, too, and that's where the sentences deck enter. And some explanation to make sense of it all and be able to put it all together.

aphasiac Wrote:Hey guys, sorry for the delay but here they are - FINALLY!

aphasiac - thanks for uploading those. They are great. A few comments about the sentences.
1) I understand why you did it this way, but hope they wind up in the anki shared deck repository eventually
2) I've already started using the first of the "Mastering Chinese Character" decks (MCC), which is the main reason I'm not going to use Core
3) The Core sentences appear to be the same as MCC. I didn't check audio, but I bet it's also the same
4) There are 4885 sentences in Core that have hanzi (about 500 don't)
5) Core has simplified only. MCC has both. MCC also has some extra info that I don't find helpful.
6) Core has L2 to L1 cards. MCC has both, which I don't find useful.
7) There are 10 MCC decks. After stripping off everything except L2 to L1 sentences, there were 321 sentences. If this keeps up, there will be a total of 3210, which is less than Core. But I wouldn't be surprised if the final number is exactly the same, since they appear to be using the same facts.
8) Stripping off everything except L2 to L1 sentences took me about 15 minutes for the first MCC deck. My plan is to do this with the following decks, and then merge them. So there is more work than just using Core.

aphasiac Wrote:Hey guys, sorry for the delay but here they are - FINALLY!

Fabulous!

I downloaded all images and packaged them.
For the vocab, the only missing images (not available online) are:
4660454.jpg, 1050820.jpg

Download the images here: depositfiles.com/files/yu6bnl434
Place them in Chinese vocab.media/images/
Download the file to update the image fields here: megaupload.com/?d=HQQMOKGC
Just use Anki import -> update fields. Use field 2 of the file corresponding to the iKnowID. Then use <img src="{{{Image_URI}}}" /> on your card layout.

Updated file to update fields with.

leosmith Wrote:

aphasiac Wrote:Hey guys, sorry for the delay but here they are - FINALLY!

aphasiac - thanks for uploading those. They are great. A few comments about the sentences.
1) I understand why you did it this way, but hope they wind up in the anki shared deck repository eventually
2) I've already started using the first of the "Mastering Chinese Character" decks (MCC), which is the main reason I'm not going to use Core
3) The Core sentences appear to be the same as MCC. I didn't check audio, but I bet it's also the same
4) There are 4885 sentences in Core that have hanzi (about 500 don't)
5) Core has simplified only. MCC has both. MCC also has some extra info that I don't find helpful.
6) Core has L2 to L1 cards. MCC has both, which I don't find useful.
7) There are 10 MCC decks. After stripping off everything except L2 to L1 sentences, there were 321 sentences. If this keeps up, there will be a total of 3210, which is less than Core. But I wouldn't be surprised if the final number is exactly the same, since they appear to be using the same facts.
8) Stripping off everything except L2 to L1 sentences took me about 15 minutes for the first MCC deck. My plan is to do this with the following decks, and then merge them. So there is more work than just using Core.

I just took a look; the "Mastering Chinese Characters" shared decks on Anki is the SAME as I've uploaded, just in a different order. It corresponds to the beginners, intermediate and advanced parts, the "news" section isn't included (hence less facts overall). Also they didn't bother to split the "reading" field into simplified and traditional fields; it contains both. Otherwise same content, same audio, same everything; so yep either is good.

KanjiDevourer Wrote:

aphasiac Wrote:Hey guys, sorry for the delay but here they are - FINALLY!

Fabulous!

I downloaded all images and packaged them.
For the vocab, the only missing images (not available online) are:
4660454.jpg, 1050820.jpg

Download the images here: [url=]pending...[/url]
Place them in Chinese vocab.media/images/
Download the file to update the image fields here: megaupload.com/?d=2JWZEWM9
Just use Anki import -> update fields. Use field 2 of the file corresponding to the iKnowID. Then use <img src="{{{Image_URI}}}" /> on your card layout.

Awesome! so all audio and images are now available offline, nice resource! Does your file work with the sentence deck too? will try and combine them..

About the Smart.fm audio, I noticed that the volume is not consistent and is clipping, so one thing I did was to use MP3Gain to normalize it; 89 dB works great and the clippings are gone.

Anyway, I decided to try something different with the sentence deck. Here's how I'm using it, it might spark some ideas:

→ Question: audio + pictures* for context
* I've downloaded them all and updated the model for offline use.

→ Answer: type in the hanzi + understand what was said, checking the English translation when necessary.

This way you (well, me) practice your listening comprehension with some sort of dictation, practice placing the punctuation in the right places—in Mandarin is a little different from English—and get fully used to the IME of your choice (I use Google's.) I'm also using an AHK script that makes CapsLock+R play the audio again in Anki and CapsLock+F asks me to type the answer again, which I do when I give the wrong answer.

As for the vocab I'm doing the usual:
1. recognition (hanzi as question) + typing the pinyin with tone marks using Pinyinput;
2. production (hanzi as answer, writing down on paper)

, but using another source for words (HSK + mined,) nothing too fancy. I've found that typing the tone marks helps to fix in my memory the correct tones for individual words, which has its uses; I was doing this for sentences too, but decided to continue doing it only for words. All my cards have audio, which I think it's very important.

Here's my updated version of the Smart.fm decks previously uploaded by aphasiac, now in an all-in-one package with pictures, normalized audio (89 dB with MP3Gain), all the simplified hanzi fields filled, changed fonts, added folders, created a commonly used default model and so on; it's helpful for those who want to get everything at once in an even more ready-to-use format.

Description: Smart.fm sentences and vocab deck for Anki with audio and pictures.
Compressed size: 379.29 MB, 7zip.
Uncompressed size: 591 MB.

• Anki - Smart.fm - Chinese Sentences and Vocab v2 (@4shared)
• Anki - Smart.fm - Chinese Sentences and Vocab v2 (@Google Drive)

This looks awesome. The only problem I see (and it isn't a problem with the deck itself, being mainly a vocab deck) is a lack of grammar coverage. After a quick search I noticed even relatively basic structures such as V得起, V得到, V起O來, V不及, etc. aren't in the sentences. Such things will certainly be needed in order to read manga and kids' books (我這次考得不好。我爸爸一定會生氣得說不出話來。). Is there a source like Tae Kim's grammar guide for Japanese, but for Chinese? I thought I remembered that Tae Kim was thinking about working on one a while back, but it doesn't look like it ever came about.

bflatnine Wrote:This looks awesome. The only problem I see (and it isn't a problem with the deck itself, being mainly a vocab deck) is a lack of grammar coverage. After a quick search I noticed even relatively basic structures such as V得起, V得到, V起O來, V不及, etc. aren't in the sentences. Such things will certainly be needed in order to read manga and kids' books (我這次考得不好。我爸爸一定會生氣得說不出話來。). Is there a source like Tae Kim's grammar guide for Japanese, but for Chinese? I thought I remembered that Tae Kim was thinking about working on one a while back, but it doesn't look like it ever came about.

It'd be interesting to know one, indeed!

Sources I found so far:

http://www.rci.rutgers.edu/~rsimmon/chingram/
http://www.learn-chinese-language-online...ammar.html
http://www.chinese-outpost.com/language/grammar/
http://www.unilang.org/wiki/index.php/Chinese_Grammar

I might be wrong, but together they seem to cover beginner to intermediate grammar --- the first link does look very comprehensive.

gdaxeman Wrote:Here's my updated version of the Smart.fm decks previously uploaded by aphasiac, now in an all-in-one package with pictures, normalized audio (89 dB with MP3Gain), all the simplified hanzi fields filled, changed fonts, added folders, created a commonly used default model and so on; it's helpful for those who want to get everything at once in an even more ready-to-use format.

Link: http://www.megaupload.com/?d=YNQNHB21 (379.75 MB, 7zip).
Filename: anki-chinese-vocab-and-sentences-with-audio-and-pictures.7z
Uncompressed size: 593 MB.

http://i43.tinypic.com/2dvk0zm.png

I was hoping someone would do that. Thanks.

This looks awesome! I might just start learning mandarin

Zorlee Wrote:This looks awesome! I might just start learning mandarin

Yeah, do it! Use all the resources!