Hey everyone

I just wanted to ask your opinion on use of Anki. Currently I have a sentences deck which has cards for speaking, reading, typing pinyin and typing characters.

I'm thinking about getting rid of the typing characters cards as they're so time consuming and I'm not sure they add that much to my learning.

Thoughts?

Typing pinyin is very useful as it teaches pronunciation. Typing characters (I guess using an IME?) doesn't sound so useful, unless you think you need to work on your Chinese typing skills.

I used to do something similar, but since I was using the Microsoft IME, typing characters basically meant typing pinyin and scanning through the list to find the correct character; since I was separately studying pinyin and using Skritter to study writing, I stopped typing the characters.

James

I have a front card with Chinese, a back card with English. For one card I read out the Chinese (and think of the meaning). The other I translate the English, saying the Chinese out loud.

It's a quick way of doing things, and it seems to work pretty well. Typing might have a few benefits, but I can see it being very slow.

(When I say Chinese, I mean hanzi. I've no pinyin here at all. With Skritter I'm able to read them well enough, and pronunciation isn't much of a problem).

Yeah thanks guys, this confirmed what I was thinking. Have just deleted about 1500 cards on that basis :-) I knew the Skritter forum was the place to ask about studying efficiently.

@Byzanti: For me pronunciation is one of the major things I want to focus on, as I'm not living anywhere near China and have only intermittent conversation practice.

Skritter has come a long way in this regard with reading practice. However, there are still several things you can do with Anki that you can't do with Skritter. Some of these might be relatively easy to build, since they already have all the data in their system:

x->y means "prompt with x, answer with y":

hanzi->audio
English definition->audio
pinyin->audio
English definition->pinyin
audio->pinyin
pinyin->English definition
audio->English definition
audio->hanzi

Naturally "audio" would only apply to the items for which they had audio recordings.

James

That would be great, I think. I'm always torn between two things, though - covering all bases (as James as described) and being efficient.

If you've got the time then covering all bases is definitely the right way to go as it guarantees you'll tackle any weaknesses and maintain all strengths. But then if you're pressed for time it can be frustrating to e.g. give the same answer repeatedly in different formats.

Fully agree with James’ saying that typing pinyin is very useful. For many a time, I’ve thought that I know the pinyin, only to have the result marked wrong by the meticulous computer. Without typing it out and checked by the machine, I may never have discovered my mistakes.

Also, Anki has help me in learning those characters with more than one pinyin or tone. With Anki, I can do something like the following:

hanzi + definition(n) -> pinyin(n)
hanzi + pinyin(n) -> definition(n)

where definition(n) is the nth definition corresponding to the nth pinyin (pinyin(n)) of a hanzi.

I'm still not convinced. If I am unsure on the tone I double check it (copy and paste into MDBG). (A hover over would be nicer!). About half of those I'm unsure about are wrong.

Doing it this way, I'm confident I get the right tones. It's just a lot of practice reading out. In fact, I tend to correct my teacher a lot more than she corrects me with new words. This is not to say that my spoken Chinese is tone perfect, it's just that if I'm reading out Chinese or thinking about it I'll pretty much get the correct tone.

If I were typing rather than speaking in Anki, I doubt I'd be able to do this. Really I can't see how typing leads to better spoken Chinese, when you could just speak it.

As another note; the only time I type pinyin is when inputting stuff on the computer. Otherwise I try and avoid it. I prefer to associate sounds with characters. In my notebook for new characters, I never write it (although I colour code the character for tone), I don't do reading practice on Skritter (otherwise use hide pinyin), I dislike seeing pinyin in books or beside sentences (distraction I can do without).

I don't see the value of it past a certain point...

I only do conversation practice maybe a couple of times a month with a tutor. When I'm at my computer and I say a phrase out loud, I don't know if I'm saying it correctly, and I wouldn't trust myself enough to grade it. However, Anki and Skritter can correct my pinyin.

If I can type the pinyin 100% correctly with the correct tone numbers, then the only further question is whether I can pronounce the pinyin and tones correctly. That, I have to practice with my tutor.

Yes, this does take a while. However, when I learn to type the reading for a phrase, that gives me 100% confidence that I can pronounce it within the limits of my 美国人 accent.

James

Do you read out words on Skritter? I find that helps me be a lot more confident with my own pronunciation. Saying the word before revealing the pinyin.

Yes, when I'm in reading practice mode I say the word/phrase aloud, then type it in.

James, you're American? Don't know why but I had assumed you were British!

I did too :s.

Subterfuge!

Why would y'all think that, now?

I say, chaps! We've been hoodwinked!

Hi,

I am starting to use Anki for the Chinese but I do not find (yet) any deck just with the Pinyin...There is always only the Hanzi (I am focusing myself on the conversational part of Chinese so far). Do you know if we can and where we can find this?
Thanks in advance

Yes, I am also looking for Pinyin only cards for Anki with audio.
Would any one have one deck to share?
Thanks a lot

Incidentally, the first proper iphone/ipod touch/ipad(?) anki client was released today. Still needs work, but it's pretty neat.

Afraid I can't help either of you two above...

yea I was looking out for the Anki client. $30 is a bit too expensive though :(

@breadbox:

You can have Anki generate pretty good quality pinyin from hanzi. Go to download shared plugins, and download pinyin toolkit. It takes a little bit of setting up but it will then be able to generate pinyin (amongst other things) if you give it cards with hanzi.

I don't think you'd be able to download a deck with audio included - the Anki servers don't sync media as it's too much data.

This
http://comet.cls.yale.edu/mandarin/content/grammar.htm
is pretty good for getting example sentences with accessible mp3 audio though.

@aeriph and @breadbox:
AnkiOnline and the iPhone app can sync multimedia content using DropBox. So the DropBox file sharing site site handles the multimedia downloads/uploads, and all the Anki servers are doing is syncing URL's, if I understand correctly. DropBox gives you 2GB for free, can pay for more. Here's the help page for setting that up:
http://ichi2.net/anki/wiki/MediaSync

I just did and it's awesome, AnkiOnline works really well on my PC, with graphics and mp3 files and everything. AnkiOnline on my iPod touch doesn't work so well - cards with lots of text gum it up. I believe I'll be purchasing the iPhone client soon, so I can tell you how that goes.

@aeriph I find the pinyin generated by the Pinyin Toolkit to be too unreliable for study. There are many, many errors; it doesn't even do basic tone sandhi, let alone context-specific tone/pinyin differences like 音乐 vs. 快乐 (yue4 vs. le4 for 乐).

James

Yay! James is back! It's been a quiet place without him...

@jcardenio does that mean I talk too much? ;)

After not practicing for more than 2 weeks I have 2,925 items to review, so maybe I should avoid the forum for a while...

James