(N.B. A much-improved version of this script is published in a later post)
Language learners who want to develop their listening comprehension skills often turn to YouTube for videos that feature native language content. Often these videos have subtitles in the original language. A handful of applications allow users to take these videos along with their subtitles and chop them up into sentence-length bites that are suitable for Anki cards. Once such application is Knowclip.
The Anki add-on AwesomeTTS has been a vital tool for language learners using the Anki application on the desktop. It allows you to have elements of the card read aloud using text-to-speech capabilities. The new developer of the add-on has added a number of voice options, including the Microsoft Azure voices. The neural voices for Russian are quite good. But they have one major issue, syllabic stress marks that are sometimes seen in text intended for language learners cause the Microsoft Azure voices to grossly mispronounce the word.
After developing a rudimentary approach to detecting resistant language learning cards in Anki, I began teasing out individual factors. Once I was able to adjust the number of lapses for the age of the card, I could examine the effect of different factors on the difficulty score that I described previously.
Findings Some of the interesting findings from this analysis:
Prompt-answer direction - 62% of lapses were in the Russian → English (recognition) direction.
Regardless of how closely you adhere to the 20 rules for formating knowledge, there are cards that seem destined to leechdom. For me part of the problem is that with languages, straight-up vocabulary cards take words out of the rich context in which they exist in the wild. With my maturing collection of Russian decks, I recently started to go through these resistant cards and figure out why they are so difficult.
As readers of this blog know, I’m an avid user of Anki to learn Russian. I have a number of sources for reference content that go onto my Anki cards. Notably, I use Wiktionary to get word definitions and the word with the proper syllabic stress marked. (This is an aid to pronunciation for Russian language learners.)
Since I’m lazy to the core, I came up with a system way of grabbing the stress-marked word from the Wiktionary page using lxml and XPath.
Previously, I wrote about adding syllabic stress marks to Russian text. Here’s a method for doing the opposite - that is, removing such marks (ударение) from Russian text.
Although there may well be a more sophisticated approach, regex is well-suited to this task. The problem is that
def string_replace(dict,text): sorted_dict = {k: dict[k] for k in sorted(dict)} for n in sorted_dict.keys(): text = text.replace(n,dict[n]) return text dict = { "а́" : "а", "е́" : "е", "о́" : "о", "у́" : "у", "я́" : "я", "ю́" : "ю", "ы́" : "ы", "и́" : "и", "ё́" : "ё", "А́" : "А", "Е́" : "Е", "О́" : "О", "У́" : "У", "Я́" : "Я", "Ю́" : "Ю", "Ы́" : "Ы", "И́" : "И", "Э́" : "Э", "э́" : "э" } print(string_replace(dict, "Существи́тельные в шве́дском обычно де́лятся на пять склоне́ний.
The AppleScript Safari API is apparently quite finicky and rejects Russian Cyrillic characters when loading URLs.
For example, the following URL
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/стоять#Russian throws an error in AppleScript. Instead, Safari requires URL’s of the form
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%D1%81%D1%82%D0%BE%D1%8F%D1%82%D1%8C#Russian whereas Chrome happily consumes whatever comes along. So, we just need to encode the URL thusly:
use framework "Foundation" – encode Cyrillic test as "%D0" type strings on urlEncode(input) tell current application's NSString to set rawUrl to stringWithString_(input) – 4 is NSUTF8StringEncoding set theEncodedURL to rawUrl's stringByAddingPercentEscapesUsingEncoding:4 return theEncodedURL as Unicode text end urlEncode When researching Russian words for vocabulary study, I use the URL encoding handler to load the appropriate words into several reference sites in sequential Safari tabs.
I was puzzled by this sentence on the BBC Russian Service:
Нет свидетельств тому, что на нынешних выборах дело обстоит иначе.
ББС Мошенничество на выборах в США? Проверяем факты в речи Трампа It means “There is no evidence that in the current election things are any different." but the puzzle isn’t the meaning, it’s the grammatical case in which the author has placed the demonstrative pronoun то , which is dative here тому .
There’s a phenomenon that verteran Anki users are familiar with - the so-called “Anki hell” or “ease hell.”
Origins of ease hell The descent into ease hell has to do with the way Anki handles correct and incorrect answers when it presents cards for review. Ease is a numerical score associated with every card in the database and represents a valuation of the difficulty of the card. By default, when cards graduate from the learning phase, an ease of 250% is applied to the card.
While Russian text intended for native speakers doesn’t show accented vowel characters to point out the syllabic stress (ударение) , many texts intended for learners often do have these marks. But how to apply these marks when typing?
Typically, for Latin keyboards on macOS, you can hold down the key (like long-press on iOS) and a popup dialog will show you options for that character. But in the standard Russian phonetic keyboard it doesn’t work.