Does anyone know how to make anki play the sound right. It skips or cuts off parts whenever It plays an mp3.

kazelee Wrote:Does anyone know how to make anki play the sound right. It skips or cuts off parts whenever It plays an mp3.

I have had the same problem with mp3 files in general, but it comes & goes depending on what computer I use & what version of Anki I use. The most recent Anki version (on my computer) has the most problems with this of the different versions I have used. I get around it by playing the play button a bunch of times in rapid succession...this usually gets a couple of smooth playbacks. I have yet to try the patch suggested previously though.

I've tried that script. I does a good job of stopping the high pitched playback problem, but not the playback skipping problem.

I too tried pressing the button many times, but for some files it just doesn't work.

Shakkun, thank you for collecting the data from iKnow. I'm using them in Anki and it's a lot of fun, especially having the native audio. I really hope they'll expand the collection as announced.

have you guys watched the video presentation for iKnow? man this program rules! check it out, it's a must see: http://link.brightcove.com/services/play...1778584032

Woah, that Steve Jobs dictation thing was awesome. I wonder how hard is it to set that up from a youtube video? Stuff like that for Japanese would be sweet. The rest of the program seems nice but I like just having everything together in Anki.

Just a heads up, for some reason the Step 5 images folder is a duplicate of the Step 4 one. I'll upload a replacement to the forum post soon.

What I've been doing so far is just importing all 1800 sentences from steps 3-10 suspended, and whenever I need another example for a word I search for it and unsuspend that card. It works really well because I have a lot of gaps in my basic vocab, especially kunyomi, and hearing it with audio/emotion a few times seems to make words stick like glue. Even if the sentences aren't inspiring.

Unfortunately it doesn't look like there's any difficulty difference between steps 3 and 10. I'm looking forward to the next sets. I'll probably be using them like this for a while.

There is a recent longer presentation video available on this post including some information on their business model:

http://asiajin.com/blog/2008/10/07/tokyo...ite-iknow/

chewtoy Wrote:There is a recent longer presentation video available on this post including some information on their business model:

http://asiajin.com/blog/2008/10/07/tokyo...ite-iknow/

I've been wondering what their business model was, but I don't have 44 minutes to find out. Could you summarize?

Thanks.

what i got from that video was that they are planning to offer their program free but they may have additional premium content in the future. as for how they will make their most money, they will including advertisement in the learning material... for example, if starbucks advertises with them they might include starbucks advertisement sentences as their example sentences... they said it could all be intergrated with the learning but made a point that it won't be in a bad way.....

nest0r Wrote:Weird. I bet it's somehow tied up in the specs of the mp3 and how Anki handles it, though. Are you using a Mac? I saw something in Anki release notes for Macs about fixing scratchy audio in later versions.

On a related note, anybody figure out how to hotkey the 'play' button in Anki? I get tired of using the mouse to do it every time I want to repeat.

I converted all the mp3s to oggs and edited the text files accordingly. There is no more choppiness. I'm not aware of what problems converting to ogg might cause, though.

Some other notes from that video presentation and the site:

Common Content (CC) - All of the material on iKnow is listed as common content. That means it's free to download, share, use for public and private purposes so long as iKnow's contribution (or original contributor) is acknowledged.

Group Effort - The user created lists are meant to be shared among other users. Similar to what we've been doing on this site with spread sheets. This is a very ambitious concept if you think about it. Ten people can create Twenty detailed items (word - sentence - audio - translation - photo) then combine into a 200 word list.

Item Creation - If you look at how you can construct an item, you can add a photo from Flikr or other sources, a sentence, a translation, an audio source, etc. There's even discussion and user data on each item.

It will stay free - It will have ads, but the idea is that ads are not intrusive. Something like anything referencing airplanes would have a photo of Virgin Airlines plane.

I did some messing around a bit more. One thing I did was create a word list based off Kanji's 1 - 15 and 16 - 30 in KO2001. Another thing I tried to do was combine the Japanese Core words into one big list of 2000. The idea being I'll review items the system thinks are due, then slowly add new words once the reviews are done. Well, you are limited to 500 items for an individual word list. So for Japanese Core I'll end up creating four lists, which should take a while to eat through.

Another thing I tested was what happens when you try to go through all your words too fast (with 200 word list this is difficult, but a 30 word is not). If you do your whole word list, it won't let you review the words again too early. This is good considering the 500 word limit. Example: I like to study 2 hours total a day. If my first batch (1-500) which I've been working on for 3 weeks now shows all necessary reviews done after 30 minutes, I know I can move onto batch two (501-1000) which I've been working on in the last week due to having the study time.

I'll be honest, the ambition of the iKnow project really impresses me. I've actually been putting my Anki reviews on hold and concentrating on iKnow.

Nukemarine Wrote:Some other notes from that video presentation and the site:

Thanks! I was wondering what else was said, but the prospect of watching a 44 minute video... I couldn't deal with it.

Although "the sentences aren't inspiring" (shakkun) the combination with the audio (+picture) makes it really an impressive source for learning.

I just started to use the material in my SRS with a dictation mode (q: audio and picture; a: audio and sentence plus hidden kana and translation, just in case). I only made 30 so far, so I can't say how it affected my learning, but definitely it is a great writing practice for me.

Nukemarine: If you can input the material in one list in your SRS, why do you make the extra effort to create and keep four lists at iKnow? Could you explain what is the benefit from using iKnow versus using the material in your SRS?

Yes, I mean, iKnow is just an srs, but premade. Why do both?

wccrawford - I recommend you watch it as it's in both English and Japanese (female Japanese translator).

Matthias - I'm going to use iKnow as the SRS for the material on that site. I'll also keep using anki for other material: Kanji higher in level than what I have activate on RTK, Japanese faces/names, Tae Kim's grammar sentences, whatever else. As for the benefit of iKnow over Anki, that remains to be seen. The programmer "Russ" will post a blog giving better detail on how iKnow tracks and schedules your items.

I'm not going to be doing both iKnow and Anki on the same material though. That'd be redundant.

You can use Anki offline. That's one reason why I would prefer to use Anki, personally.

Anki is very versatile. The ability to use it offline was essential for me being on a ship where stretches at a time can be without connection (and next year is completely up in the air).

However, I'm giving iKnow a shot. It may be that they'll create a way do use it offline to boot. I think that question has been asked about before on the site's forum.

hey guys i thought i that i might post this here... i e-mailed the content provider for iKnow "xaky" and asked him about the new lists and if they are based on JLPT or not etc. anyways here is what he wrote me back( the new intermediate courses are coming out very very soon ^_^):


There's going to be a considerable amount of coverage of levels up to JLPT 3 this time around. Also, in the current plan, the intermediate courses are going to be released on a staggered schedule, with the second part coming out about a week or so after the first part. Even when the advanced level goes up before the end of the year (planned), however, there is still going to be some JLPT material not covered and other material in our courses going beyond the JLPT's scope. Our courses weren't designed specifically with the JLPT in mind. We might offer other remedial measures.
In the meantime, I think you'll see that our item bank has a very good coverage of JLPT material. You can check for yourself using JLPT vocab lists available online in different places. I already see some user-generated JLPT lists up on the site, and everyone's free to make their own.
Cheers!

xaky is a really cool guy and responds well to e-mails so add him to your friends list and e-mail him if you got a question about iKnow

woohoo the new iKnow courses are coming out now! check it out guys! http://www.iknow.co.jp/list/24532-japane...000-step-1

Good news! Sad that I have 1600 beginner words to go 'till I get there...

The loading on the new ones is extremely slow for me. Maybe too many people trying at once.

i thought this was a pretty cool quote from the intermediate series on iKnow:

Once you have completed this series, you will have a very solid command of spoken Japanese and you will be able to follow the majority of what you may read in newspapers.

pretty freaking sweet ^_^

and a new blog entry is here: http://www.iknow.co.jp/blog/en/2008/10/1...s-and-kana

I'm a little sad there are no pictures for these ones. One thing I've discovered about the basic series is they're perfect for going monolingual with. I've basically just set the English field to an unreadably small font for editing so I never see it. Between the image, the fact that the sentences were so simple, and that there was only ever one new word, I never needed the translation or J/E dictionary.

Anyways, do people have a preference for the spaces in the kana sentences? I removed them for the first lot because I really dislike them (actually find it harder to read that way). But I notice Khatsumoto uses them in the example cards so maybe people prefer it? It would be easy enough to leave them and just remove them for my deck.

If nobody says anything either way I'll remove them.

For the lists I made, I removed them. I was delighted to see them gone in the lists you made too. I can only understand using spaces when using romaji. I think it just adds another unnecessary step to the process.