I just came across this new site for learning Japanese. http://www.iknow.co.jp
It uses an elaborate flash application to teach you materials, though from my short experience with it, I did not like it much. However, they have a TON of example sentences complete with audio!
These would be great to add to anki, though the trouble is, how exactly to GET the example sentences? They have a pretty awesome feature where it will generate a custom podcast for you. After you study some material in their iKnow flash application, then it will become available in your podcast. However, it is a bit cumbersome and time consuming to have to go through all that for all the example sentences.
I thought it's worth taking a look at though, and there may be some completely obvious way of grabbing the sentences that I am overlooking.

The Orbit download manager has a feature called grab++, for downloading streaming content. All you have to do is start it up then play the audio file for whatever sentence you want, and it will grab the actual mp3 file it's streaming.

nest0r Wrote:The sentences are made by users? I wouldn't use them, if so. ^_^

No they aren't.

No, the core content is provided by the CJK Dictionary Institute, and the sentences are read by professional seiyuu. Other users can provide additional content though.

It looks good for sentence mining, if nothing else. Audio is a bonus.

I also took a quick peek at it. For mining, it's a boon. You get Japanese, kana, English translation, and a picture to relate to the sentence. If you can't extract the audio, you can instead use Text to Speech if you access to it.

I'm not impressed with the study mode, but I can see it being useful for those that like to train that way. Seems to take about 2 minutes on average per word, but that's with items I already know. However, I can see it taking just as much time as you progress.

So, great find. Definitely a bookmark worthy item. I see a spreadsheet of this site in our future.

I could not figure out how to search sentences from words in their site.

mentat_kgs Wrote:I could not figure out how to search sentences from words in their site.

Click on courses, select Japanese. Select a course level (1 most likely). There are tabs on the page, and one of them is 'sentences'.

That website seems pretty "slick" for free lessons. I suppose after the beta phase it becomes a pay to play set-up?

Tks Nukemarine,

This site looks really fancy. But hey, check out lvl 10.
The sentences are still begginer level.

My random collected sentences from everywhere look so much better than that. But I doubt that anyone could use them, besides me.

I guess is that what you get when you grade knowledge and put it in little fancy boxes.

mentat_kgs Wrote:This site looks really fancy. But hey, check out lvl 10.
The sentences are still begginer level.

They are adding more advanced lessons later on. Its just a beginner course for now.

Yeah, but wouldn't it be nice if they were doing voice acting for yahoo sentences!

Zarxrax Wrote:

mentat_kgs Wrote:This site looks really fancy. But hey, check out lvl 10.
The sentences are still begginer level.

They are adding more advanced lessons later on. Its just a beginner course for now.

So I'll add the caveat that we should follow the good advice to not add every sentence to you find into your SRS. Just go and add sentences that follow the +1 concept like always. It appears that each sentence deals with just 1 word. So after 2000 sentences, you've been tested on 2000 words. Granted, I think you'll also have a number of other words introduced to you in the context of the sentence, but not be part of how the website tests you.

Granted it occurs to me that not everyone will follow the sentence method. Some want grammar instruction, which this site will not provide it appears. This site looks to give you vocabulary in context. My guess is that you're assumed to understand verb conjugations and variants.

Of course, it seems to be established as a Japanese site to teach English. Anyone able to make out what the opinions are from that viewpoint?

I think I'll keep up with this site for the time being. In addition, I'll complete UBJG (getting them into Anki). After that, I'll look into getting these sentences into Anki, though I may just go with KO.

Again, thanks Zarxrax for posting the site. How did you find it?

I'm currently taking sentences, sounds, and images from step 1 and putting them into an anki deck. If any one wants to collaborate on it i'll send you the format and stuff.

I've been using it, I'm actually really impressed with it. The vocabulary and grammar seems about the same level as KO1 (and I'm only on Step 3, it probably gets higher later). Actually a lot of the words I'm seeing are ones I learned from the start of KO before I got distracted by other things. The sentences are a really good length, I'm not having to cut them in half like with KO. The audio recordings are a huge plus. I love Misaki but I like to read the sentences aloud so having a real human voice to model is important.

Also, I realised when you select a page and copy and paste into plain text format (like notepad), you get the sentences formatted like this:

http://media4.cerego.co.jp/contents/JLL/...01328A.mp3
彼は行政を改革したいと思っている。 play sound

彼は行政を改革したいと思っている。

かれ は ぎょうせい を かいかく したい と おもって いる

He wants to reform the administration.

And the images all have title tags which correspond exactly to the sentences they belong to.

This means with a download manager and some regex functions you can auto generate spreadsheets of the kanji sentence, kana reading, English translation, audio file and image in about five minutes.

So I've been wasting my life....

*goes to corner*

*sulks*

Nice find. I think the Dictation mode is good, and I like the fact that you can edit which items you want to include in your study, so you can deselect all the words you already know and then try their iKnow tool to learn the rest.

kazelee Wrote:I'm currently taking sentences, sounds, and images from step 1 and putting them into an anki deck. If any one wants to collaborate on it i'll send you the format and stuff.

Count me in as well. I guess we can get the work done faster if more than one person is working on it. ^_^

shakkun Wrote:This means with a download manager and some regex functions you can auto generate spreadsheets of the kanji sentence, kana reading, English translation, audio file and image in about five minutes.

Interesting.... What do you mean by regex functions ?

atreya Wrote:Interesting.... What do you mean by regex functions ?

http://www.regular-expressions.info/tutorial.html

If you download a program called EditPad Pro it makes it pretty easy. I had no prior experience with regex functions except what I picked up off Wan Zafran's Japanese learning blog posts. The functions I used were (without the quote marks):

"^.*play sound.*$" to delete the kanji sentence doubles
" [ぁ-ん]" combined with a macro to delete the spaces in the kana sentences because I hate them.
"[ぁ-ん]$" combined with a macro to replace the newlines after the kana sentences with a tab.

Mostly I just used regular old find+replace to replace newlines with tabs so I could import into Excel. And to replace "http://media4.cerego.co.jp/contents/JLL/audio/" with "[sound:" etc for Anki.

Maybe we're not taking the obvious step: Has anyone "asked" the site operators if we can download the files? Seeing that all the info is free, they may be willing to just send the file to one or two of us to share with others.

I live close to Tokyo, so hell, maybe they'll allow me to take a thumbdrive and get the info directly. I won't do it for the next two months though (broken foot).

Downloading the files is the easiest part. Select a page, hit copy, and paste it into a download manager which can bulk download from a list of links. I used MegaManager because I already had it installed, but there are almost definitely better ones (I use it because I use Megaupload a LOT).

I don't think the owners would be crazy about this method though. They would have put a lot of money into the audio files and sentences. They want people using the services on their website. I'd guess there will be pay services in the future.

shakkun Wrote:Downloading the files is the easiest part. Select a page, hit copy, and paste it into a download manager which can bulk download from a list of links. I used MegaManager because I already had it installed, but there are almost definitely better ones (I use it because I use Megaupload a LOT).

I don't think the owners would be crazy about this method though. They would have put a lot of money into the audio files and sentences. They want people using the services on their website. I'd guess there will be pay services in the future.

That's a big assumption not backed up by what they're offering. I see no ads, no sign-ups for paid membership, nadda. In fact, they state it's meant to be a free service. So, again, they (site owners) may just give the files for free. Won't know till we ask and get a response.

Then again, they may like the Anki/sentence approach so much that they integrate that into their site. They definately seemed receptive to the idea when I posted in their forums.

It's an assumption backed up by economics. If what you say is true though, that's awesome. I'm curious where the money for paying the seiyuu comes from though? Is it government sponsored?

It will be like mango languages, probably, an initial beta testing phase, and then comes restrictions and ads. They can't run it for free, they will at the least have ads or something, eventually. It's good to get people entangled and interested before bringing on the ads.

http://www.iknow.co.jp/free

In sum:

'In the future, we?re planning on providing paid services for premium subscribers, as well as introducing intelligent advertising. These new premium services will fund our continuing innovation for the entire community.'

Zarxrax - thanks for the word up about iKnow, it's terrific, been using it for over a week since I saw this thread and already picked up heaps of sundry but useful vocabulary which complements/reinforces what I learn daily at language school in Tokyo. My Japanese wife (and onetime Nihongo teacher) checked over a number of the sentences through Levels 6-7 and said they're natural and grammatically sound (if basic, and somewhat Keigo).

I also think the Dictation mode is great - similar to one of the exercises we do at school. I'll keep using the platform and see how they evolve in time to advertising/paid premium service, along with 'intermediate' level vocab builders etc.

btw I think this site (RTK) rocks and the user community/resource postings are tremendously helpful.