Transcriber, Audacity, and Anki are three programs, all free and open source, that are useful for language study. At some point in the future, I hope to write more on each of these. In the meantime, I wanted to announce two export plugins I created for Transcriber. One export creates a label file for Audacity, for splitting an audio file into individual clips, and the other creates an import file for Anki, associating the transcribed text with the audio segments. Below are step-by-step instructions for the 6 steps involved, starting from a raw audio file and finishing with a set of Anki flashcards.
Tags: flashcards, howto, Software
The Known Chinese Words Test has been running for a month now. During that time I’ve collected data from 170 trials, from learners with a wide range of levels. The results are very encouraging, so that I can give more details about what I have found. What I have been working on is a mathematical model for word knowledge, which can describe the probability for a particular person to know any word, with just a few variables involved. The results from the collected trials validates that hypothetical model, and I’m elated.
There has been a scarcity of posts on the blog lately, as I’ve been working on a web application for the site. This is a page anyone can use to estimate their knowledge of Chinese words. The start page for the test is here.
By 2008, I had been studying Chinese off and on for around 3 years. As a self-learner, my study was rather eclectic: Pimsleur, Chinesepod, and random flash card lists were my main methods. I was far from fluent, still struggling to understand all but the simplest news articles, fiction, or blog posts. But I felt like I did know a lot of words, I just didn’t know how many. How much longer before this would start to get easy? So I undertook a self-examination to estimate how many Chinese words I actually knew.
In forums for foreign language learners,1 2 certain questions recur. Some are easy to answer (Do I need to learn tones? Yes). Others (Should I study words or characters?) may have more than one answer. Two common questions I am especially interested in are:
- How many words do I know?
- How many words do I need to know (to read a newspaper, book, etc.)?
The second question is not immediately answerable except under certain conditions: if you can’t yet read your target material, then the answer is–More! Of course, people ask the second question because they want to know how close they are to their target fluency level, and the answer to the first question can give a rough estimate of that.
I recently bought an Amazon Kindle, for the primary purpose of reading more Chinese. It has turned out to be a great investment, since I am no longer tied to my computer screen for reading things I find online. I had been collecting bookmarks to online books sites for a long time without making much use of them. Now that I am a bigger consumer of reading material, I’m starting to make use of them. In particular, I need sites that allow for downloading the raw text, so that I can convert it into a formatted book. › Continue reading…
People study foreign languages in many different ways. Because my main goal is reading, my particular method for studying Chinese places a large emphasis in acquiring receptive vocabulary, knowing the pinyin and the definition of words from the written characters. This is done through either flashcard software (I use Stackz) or spaced repetition software (like Anki). If I have an electronic text available, I use home-grown scripts to segment the text into words, and then create a word list of all the unique words. If I only have a printed book or magazine, I pick out the unknown words by hand, although this can be overwhelming with a difficult text. › Continue reading…
When the forum question comes up, “What should I read when I’ve passed the beginner stage?” a number of people suggest: “哈利波特!” At one point maybe two years ago, I had peeked at a chapter posted online, just to give it a try. It seemed still to be above my level, even though I had known roughly 5,000 words or so at that time. But recently in a buying mood, I made 《哈利·波特与魔法石》 my first purchase of a Chinese book. Never having been to China, receiving it in the mail and opening the package was a real excitement, as it was my first book entirely in Chinese that wasn’t a textbook. On occasion I have checked out Chinese reading material from the local university library (which has a huge selection), but I read so slowly that I could never make it past the first 2 chapters before it was due a month later. This, on the other hand, was a book I could keep forever, giving me a hope that I could actually finish it, even if it took years. › Continue reading…
Knowing the frequency of the Chinese words you are studying helpful in a few different ways. If an unknown word is relatively common, then it’s generally more important to learn that word, compared to a less common word. With that knowledge in hand, you can feel less guilty about removing the rare words from your flashcards, and persist in learning the ones that are common yet difficult. If a word has a low frequency in general, but happens to be used a lot in a particular text, that word may be of interest to study. In the early stages of learning, studying the top N (100, 200, 500, etc.) words as flashcards is an effective way to bootstrap one’s word knowledge before diving into authentic texts. But it’s not 100% effective; the long tail of infrequent words will keep you busy learning new vocabulary for years!
So, how can we obtain word frequency data? With Chinese, it’s trickier than it sounds. › Continue reading…
Being able to stream internet radio stations from all over the world is a great opportunity for language learners. Living in a country full of native speakers is the ideal environment for listening practice, but not everyone has the chance to travel or to spend significant time in the target country. For the rest of us, listening to live radio online gives us a touch of authentic culture, whether it’s a call-in show, traditional or pop music, or even commercial ads. In addition to streaming radio, podcasts are another way to listen to native speakers. As podcasts are individual files that can be downloaded, they make suitable material for listening practice, with the ability to repeat or slow down sections that are unclear. But podcasts in Chinese are few in number. Being able to record streaming radio would give the learner a wealth of practice material with massive variety. Or it can just record hours of music for your listening pleasure. › Continue reading…
