Dragg Wrote:Well, I will start the audio-cutting for now and see how that goes along first before worrying about the next step.

I'm pretty confident that with the aid of a dictionary (and the context) I could identify what anyone is saying if the sound quality is sufficient. I think that it would be rare to encounter serious problems. So if you want to send me the sound clips that you don't understand then I would be more than happy to a) gain an extra sound file and b) send you the transcript.

I also think that the process of figuring out what people are saying is a really good exercise. If you can take your time and replay the sound over and over, it shouldn't be too hard in most cases. Whatever happens, I think there should be plenty of cases where it's easy to figure out what people are saying and the vocab is new. In these cases you're learning and you can skip the more tricky bits.

I'm going to watch a few films this week and sample a small number of short clips that I want to remember. There's two things to figure out. One, how to make the process of sampling and transcribing short clips as painless as possible. Two, how to set up some kind of sharing environment for this. I think a normal wiki like the one that Anki uses should be fine so I'll see if I can figure out how to get something set up.

Balaam Wrote:I don't have that many sound files as I've only recently started but what I do have is available on the the Anki wiki: http://ichi2.net/anki/wiki/ExtraDecks the 1000ish example sentences link.

Thanks!

duder Wrote:I've recorded my co-workers reading the sample sentences out of my 2kyu grammar text and refined them as clips that correspond to flashcards in mnemosyne http://www.mnemosyne-proj.org/ it has been an awful lot of work to make the cards, but in a very short time, I have memorized them. I catch them in the office, while watching the news ect.

The sound clips aren't perfect, they aren't voice actors, sometimes you can hear the phone ring or other people talking, but it is a very effective method for getting the grammar to stick in your head. The best part has been that mnemosyne decides the intervals between your cards, so you don't waste time reviewing cards you've mastered (something important when dealing with over 450 grammar examples).

I save one big long list of all the cards as a html file and load it into firefox and rikaichan anytime i come across a word I cant catch.

i posted some older versions (since deleted) of the cards in another thread using rapidshare, but since no one else has posted any flashcards, i'm reluctant to share the rest of them. However, if people who cut up some sentences from J-dramas, movies, ect. want to share some things, id be more than willing to share my hours and hours of work.

(now there are some copyright issues, but honestly- the books are still valuable because of the exercises that correspond to them-- and I really don't care)


the text is called 日本語総まとめ問題集２級 and is divided into 8 weeks - the focus of the flash cards is to be able to hear and understand the grammar, thats why they are ordered as they are.
http://rapidshare.com/files/121928086/week_8.zip.html

i honestly hope that we can start something where sound clip driven flash cards are shared, because its the quickest way to fluency. My Japanese has skyrocketed since I started using this method.

I'd be interested in downloading this but cannot get past rapidshare's captcha (after serveral tries). Any chance of hosting it elsewhere?

Balaam: are you a robot?

wrightak Wrote:Listening to Japanese people read texts aloud is a nice thing to have but I am most enthusiastic about obtaining sound files of natural spoken Japanese (from quiz shows, radio chats etc.).

I 100% agree with you on this one - its more fun and it feels so much more real and applicable. I really would love more cards with that "Daily Japanese" feel. I tried to watch that new show - Rookies, but for the life of me I cant understand high school boys when they swear and fight. Cards that get off the text book path would be awesome

Unfortunately (or fortunately pending on your goal), most of my cards are aimed at the JLPT level 2 (because I'm hell bent on passing it) - and as such aren't that great for speaking (my students laugh at some of my ridiculous grammar usage) .

- I also have about 175 or so sentences from the ever so wonderful "Let's speak Japanese" and I have cut up "The First Night" by Natsume Soseki into clause fragments.

If anyone wants them, I could also post some old flash cards from the Kanzen Masters 3 kyu for the JFC ( I typed all the sample sentences). There arent any sounds, but you could drop them into whatever program you're using

Now I know that some of you guys are using different flashcard programs like anki and supermemo - and its a huge pain to try to change formats, but I'd be happy with just aptly named sound files to accompany a word or excel doc or even html.

Now before I just throw everything onto the net like I did last time, I'm gonna hold out until some cards with sounds are posted (at least 100). I hope that carrot is good enough.

Balaam Wrote:I'd be interested in downloading this but cannot get past rapidshare's captcha (after serveral tries). Any chance of hosting it elsewhere?

I suppose If you really cant get it, send me an email with yours added and ill yousendit to you

duder Wrote:

Balaam Wrote:I'd be interested in downloading this but cannot get past rapidshare's captcha (after serveral tries). Any chance of hosting it elsewhere?

I suppose If you really cant get it, send me an email with yours added and ill yousendit to you

Apparently yes I am bot! I thought I'd give it one last go and I managed to get through on a "happy hour". (Anyone else having trouble with it, might try this post http://www.algorithm.co.il/blogs/index.p...-easy-way/
)

I just finished creating an Anki deck using audio sentences from Princess Mononoke. I know its not the best film for learning Japanese for most people's general purposes, but I happened to own the DVD, and there was a nice Japanese/English script floating around.

Even though its not the best for "real-world" vocab due to the fantasy themes of the film, I think it will still be useful to people looking for natural speech and rhythm patterns, and also correct grammar, and examples of formal/informal dialogue. I tried to pick only sentences that needed no visual context. I also tried to avoid idiomatic language.

There are a total of 108 Anki cards here linked up with sound clips. The sound clips range from lower intermediate to advanced difficulty, and they have between 1 to 5 sentences per clip. There are probably roughly about 250-300 or so total sentences here. The Anki fields include kanji-sentence, kana-sentence, and English translation.

I also followed the great "JayStarkey" method, meaning that I named the files in Japanese so that, optionally, you can listen to them as MP3s on your Ipod, and the mp3 titles should show up as the Japanese text version of the sentence corresponding to audio.

This is my first time sharing an Anki deck, so I won't be surprised if I screwed something up and it doesn't work at all. Let me know if the file doesn't work... and what I can do to fix it.

http://rapidshare.com/files/123474007/mo...t.zip.html

Dragg, the filenames for the mp3s are messed up, like this:



I tried renaming one of them with kanji and it worked, so my computer does support it.

Thanks Dragg! Exactly the kind of thing I'm thinking of.

@fluxcapacitor: works for me on os x.
@dragg: cool, thanks for sharing.

Namiko Abe has started up her word of the day email again. Each word has a translation, sound file and japanese rendering. I find it quite useful so I thought I'd share.

http://japanese.about.com/od/wordoftheday/p/word1.htm

@fluxcapacitor

Hmmm. I'm not sure why you are having that problem. They show up okay on the XP computer on which I made the files. Is anybody else having the same problem or know of a fix?

Same problems here. Hope that anybody knows of a way to fix this problem. Nevertheless, thanks for this file. I've been experimenting with this for about a week (using sound snippets from movies, doramas, audiobooks).

Possibly the zipping program isn't unicode friendly and has interpreted the filenames as ASCII.

Yeah, I think WinRAR is the problem. I tried creating a file with kanji in the filename and compressing it with WinRAR but it doesn't work.

Edit: I tried the newest versions of WinZip, WinRAR, IZArc, and 7-Zip and none of them worked. Strangely, I was able to create my own archive with the newest WinRAR and it correctly extracted the file with kanji in its name, but it didn't work on your zip file, Dragg.

On another note, RapidShare has the worst captcha system ever. It took me so many tries to figure out which characters had cats in them.

According to the Wikipedia article on the .zip format, it shows that added support for Unicode-8 file names was among the most recent revisions. It doesn't show dates for the changes so I don't know when this occurred. But if this change is fairly recent, it might help to explain why some programs are having problems.

The thing that really confuses is me is that the kanji file names up fine on my XP computer, even after I re-downloaded the file I shared and extracted it. But maybe its somehow associating the freshly extracted file names with the older file names that I already have on my computer on a completely different folder. (?)

The program I used last time was TugZip if I recall the name correctly. Right now I have tried again with the built-in Windows XP zip utility, and I uploaded the new file to RapidShare. If this doesn't work, I guess I will try the new WinRar since you said it worked for you. After that, I'm out of ideas. lol.

http://rapidshare.com/files/123624861/mono.zip.html

I finally got it to work for both files you posted. I changed the default system locale to Japanese (Control Panel->Regional and Language Options->Advanced tab->Language for non-Unicode programs->Japanese).

After doing that, I had to reboot and then WinRAR could correctly unzip the file. But I noticed that the \ character in windows explorer gets converted to the yen symbol when Japanese is the default locale.

BTW, I totally agree that the rapidshare captcha sucks... I wasn't even aware of it before because I had always been lucky enough to hit the "happy hour" on complete accident. What is a better service to use?

Right now, I'm cutting audio from Lupin.... Sadly, there is apparently no online script for this one, but I do have the English subtitles which appear to be mostly literal.

As far as transcribing the Japanese audio into Japanese text without a script, I really think this is going to be a huge pain, but as wrightak mentioned, ultimately rewarding. Actually, this experience with cutting up Mononoke made me realize how sharply different real spoken Japanese is from the academic stuff that a lot of us have been learning. I don't know if you noticed yet, but a lot of times near the end of a sentence in Mononoke, the kana doesn't match exactly (or sometimes even closely) with the pronunciation. I don't think this means the kana is "wrong" by any means, but its as if the speaker is trailing off with basically no concern for pronunciation. I think this probably happens in almost all languages. An example would be how in English people often say "how are ya" instead of "how are you".... or "guhna" instead of "going".

For me, this experience ultimately highlighted the importance of having real Japanese audio sources to learn from. And I'm also almost postive that learning from these short clips is much more beneficial than trying to watch a full-Japanese movie in its entiriety without repetition. And now when I go back and listen to Pimsleur or even the TTS, it seems like they talk super-slowly and over-enunciate every word... Its like listening to Dr. Phil, which would be fine if it weren't for the fact that most Japanese don't talk like Dr. Phil.

Re: Dragg's Mononoke deck: I've noticed the audio playback in Anki seems to skip, stop suddenly, not play correctly when you press the repeat button, etc. while trying to use it. Does this happen for anyone else, or is it just my computer that's acting up?

I've got a couple of DVDs around which I've got the full scripts and subtitles to, so if I can get the chance I'd like to trying putting together something like this as well. I'd just need to decide on a limit of only doing so many sentences, or I'd not stop until the whole lot is done.

Dragg Wrote:I was looking for scripts or subs for: Berserk, Serial Experiments Lain, or Lupin the 3rd: Castle of Cagliostro. I even tried using the Japanese titles along with search terms like 脚本 and 字幕. If anybody has any other ideas let me know.

The scripts for Serial Experiments Lain were released as a book (as "Scenario Experiements Lain"), but it's been out of print for some time now and doesn't seem easy to come by.

Looking at Yahoo auctions, a couple of copies are up at the moment (prices ranging from about 1600~6000 yen). But none will ship outside of Japan, so to get it from there you'd need someone in Japan to buy it for you or use one of those proxy services to bid for you.

It's not much (and maybe you already found it), but there's a couple of lines from the series at this site, just quotes the author liked (which is basically only 2 exchanges per episode):

http://www.iris.dti.ne.jp/~niino/lain/aserifu.html

I think mediafire is a bit more user friendly than rapidshare.

@albion

On my own computer, I haven't had any problems with skipping, stopping, or replay issues. However, after finally going through the deck fully for the first time ( I probably should have done this before I released it), I noticed that a handful of mp3s completely refuse to play when its their turn, and it looks like one mp3 is cued up to play on the wrong card. The latter example is my fault, but I'm totally confused about the mp3s that just don't play at all.

The funny thing is: those mp3s play fine when I first attach them to the card for the "example listen", but then they fail to play every time afterwards. I tried renaming the files, thinking that it might have been something to do with certain character combinations: Windows seems to hate renaming file names with question marks in them, colons, and it really hates a string of periods like "...." But even with those removed, I still couldn't get those few mp3s to work in Anki.

Its definitely a problem I'd like to get ironed out before I start making more decks.

albion Wrote:Re: Dragg's Mononoke deck: I've noticed the audio playback in Anki seems to skip, stop suddenly, not play correctly when you press the repeat button, etc. while trying to use it. Does this happen for anyone else, or is it just my computer that's acting up?

Same here, on mac os x. You?

Dragg Wrote:As far as transcribing the Japanese audio into Japanese text without a script, I really think this is going to be a huge pain, but as wrightak mentioned, ultimately rewarding.

If you want, you can send me sound clips and I'll transcribe them for you. It's a good exercise and I'd be happy to do it. It might cut the burden down for you. My email address is referenced on this page:

http://wrightak.googlepages.com/afterrtk12

Dragg Wrote:BTW, I totally agree that the rapidshare captcha sucks... I wasn't even aware of it before because I had always been lucky enough to hit the "happy hour" on complete accident. What is a better service to use?

If it's an Anki deck, why not zip it up with all the sound files and post it on the extra decks section of the Anki wiki?