ANKI

jendafer1

Hi everyone,

I hope your Japanese learning is going well, some of the stories on here are so inspiring! My Japanese learning is sporadic at best, at the moment I feel like I spend more time researching "how to learn Japanese" than actually learning any!
Anyway, I just wanted to ask on here firstly if anyone uses the "anki" software for flashcards and if so if you knew if it was possible to automatically add Japanese pronouciation to your own created cards? I had originally been using quizlet which does this automatically, a really great feature, but I appreciate that anki is a more powerful programme so was hoping it could do the same?

thanks

jen

Farcear

Do you mean recording yourself and adding that void clip to the Anki card?

jendafer1

No, unfortunately my Japanese pronunciation is very poor! I mean is there a way of inputting a computerised voice automatically into the flashcards?

Farcear

I'm not aware of any way to add pronunciation automatically.

The nice thing about Japanese is that the pronunciation is relatively straight forward, so once you know the kana you basically have the pronunciation anyway.

It seems that the only benefit would be for those words with a slightly unexpected / irregular omission of the vowel sounds, e.g. です。 For words like that, I'm not sure that a computer would get it correct. I think you are better off downloading the human-read version of the word at Forvo -- http://www.forvo.com/languages/ja/

jendafer1

Oh wow thanks I'd never heard of that forvo website, what an amazing resource!

You're right too about the simple pronounciation, at the minute my hiragana isnt quite automatic, and some of the Japanese cards I'm using also have kanji (I've been studying the "japanese core 2000" flashcards).

As an aside, quizlet has a "game" where by it pronounces a word and you have to spell it out in hiragana, I'm finding it very useful to get my head around both hiragana and pronounciation

hibby

Anki's great, and of course there are plenty of pre-made decks available, some of which have sound files included.

I have an Anki app on my smart phone, which is very handy for learning when I'm on the train.