Anyone know how to export Surusu decks to Anki?

Like it says in the topic, I want to export Surusu decks to Anki. Surusu and Anki are both SRS (spaced repetition something-or-the-other) programs that help with learning new vocabulary and stuff. I used Surusu for a couple of years then stopped SRSing altogether. Recently I picked it up again recently and switched to Anki instead of Surusu for the following reasons

  • Surusu hasn’t updated in a while. The owner Khatz of All Japanese All the Time hasn’t updated his blog in ages so the tool is most likely good as dead.
  • Anki has a better community in case I need a little extra help.
  • I like the Anki interface a little better. Barebones Surusu was good when I had a slow, unreliable connection but now I don’t really need it. It just looks cluttered.
  • I have a Moto E smartphone and a Galaxy Note 10.1 tablet now, and I like the slick look of Ankidroid, so I recently started using it. Strictly speaking I could get by just fine with the desktop version with syncs to the web version, but I’m a sucker for apps.
  • I like having a desktop version of my SRS deck instead of having everything stored on someone’s server that could go poof at any time.
export surusu decks to anki
Surusu vs Anki, which one is better? (psst: It’s not Surusu)

The last point in particular is a big issue for me since I have a lot of cards in Surusu. Which brings me back to my main question, how do I export those cards and either import them into Anki or just leave them lying around my computer as is my right because they are my cards?

I did some research online but the only concrete result I found was over 3 years old and pointed to this possible solution on Github which involves installing Ruby (who’s she?) and something called “scrapi gem” on my computer. The instructions themselves don’t look that complicated, but I thought I’d cast about online for other possible solutions first. If nothing turns up/I manage to work something out, I’ll post it here to be fair, but in the meantime, anyone have any ideas? Any positive experiences trying to retrieve your decks from Surusu? Please share, thanks!

Radio/TV programs for learning Japanese and Cantonese

Why yes, I’m still learning those two languages. My Japanese is leaps and bounds ahead of my Cantonese of course, so much so that sometimes I don’t even notice that I’m reading or listening to something in Japanese because it feels so natural. But I still have a long way to go with spoken Japanese, mostly because I don’t have the chance to speak it often. That’s why I think it’s necessary to listen to Japanese radio and TV as much as possible.

While it’s true you can learn a lot of spoken Japanese from anime, the fact remains that real Japanese people don’t talk as clearly and in turn and in such orderly, sensible sentences. You want real Japanese, you have to listen to regular humans speaking it to other regular Japanese people. Which is where Japanese radio comes in.

In the past I spent a lot of time trying to find various radio stations and switching back and forth all the time (chronicled in earlier articles in this blog), but nowadays I’m busy, to start with, plus there’s much to be gained by sticking to one station (easier to remember the schedule, easier to find favorite programs and announcers, etc), so I have one go-to radio station for Japanese, and one for Cantonese.

fm castle topFM Castle (Japanese) – You’ll also find it called FM Tanba in places on the internet. It’s a local radio station from Fukuchiyama in Kyoto. You can listen to the broadcast on their website or do like I do and download the asx and add it to your Windows Media Player playlist. You can also listen to them at TuneIn.

What I like about FM Castle is that during the night (Japan time) they play a lot of older Japanese music from the 60s, 70s and 80s, which I really enjoy listening to much more than modern J-Pop. The female singers in the 60s and 70s could really sing as well, beautiful clear voices all around. I keep adding new songs to my mp3 list all the time. Some of the songs are a bit, uhhh, racy though, like the old “Don’t make me take my sailor uniform off” (セーラ服を脱がさないで) songs and stuff, so once in a while I have to mute the station until they sing sometime sensible. During the day they have a lot of talk shows and interviews so you can get your regular listening practice in as well.

rthk logoRTHK Radio 2 (Cantonese) – Their website stream is working again. RTHK has a lot of radio stations, which is why I have to specify Radio 2. Radio 1 is very boring, all about politics and news and more politics. Unless you’re into that sort of thing. Radio 3 is English, I believe, and then some of the other channels broadcast Mandarin only. Radio 2 is the best because it’s mostly Cantonese, and they have a very good mix of music and talk programs. I prefer the music programs like Ngo Ngoi Guangdong Go 我愛廣東歌 (I love Cantonese music) on Sundays and San gwong dai yat sin 晨光第一線 and Hing Tam Chin Cheung Bat ye Tin 輕談淺唱不夜天 at night. Very lively conversations during the day.

Guang Dong TV (Cantonese) – I don’t watch this too often, because somehow I always tend to tune in when they’re giving the news. The newscaster usually speaks in Cantonese with a Mandarin accent and a lot of Mandarin words (has to be heard to be believed) but when they interview people, those people almost always speak Mandarin so I really can’t follow along much.

Once in a while I’m lucky to watch when there’s a drama on, which is usually interesting, but then I forget to tune in the next day and then it’s back to square one. What I need to do is find the TV schedule and pick a few programs to follow. Must put that on my To Do list.

downtown dxDowntown DX & Honma Deka? (Japanese) – The Japanese TV shows I used to watch to get my listening practice in. I usually just get my episodes from Youtube and don’t really care too much whether they’re in broadcast order or not. Recently I’ve stopped watching them, though. I dunno, they just seem so trivial and superficial to me. What this “talent” is wearing, what that talent ate, and the tips and ‘research’ presented on Honma Deka is always spurious and poorly-researched at best, often selected for shock factor rather than usefulness. So I’m actually on the hunt for interesting Japanese programs is anyone has any to recommend.

So that’s the learning situation right now. I can say for sure I learn a lot from listening to Japanese radio, probably because I understand about 95% of what they’re saying already. With Cantonese I just enjoy hearing it spoken, but it would help if I backed up my listening with further studies. I’m working on a new Anki deck featuring actual spoken Cantonese instead of textbook examples, I’ll talk about it one of these days. Until then, that’s the progress I’m making!

Why I stopped reading Yomiuri Komachi

Do you know Yomiuri Komachi? It’s a Japanese webforum that’s basically an agony aunt site (http://komachi.yomiuri.co.jp/)*. People post their problems and other users give them advice and potential solutions. Problem posters can write back and answer questions, ask further questions or give updates on how the situation turned out, which was my favorite part of the site. I used to be an avid reader of the site right up to this month. I even translated a few of the problems into English on this very site.

*(More accurately it’s actually 発言小町 hatsugen komachi that’s the name of the agony aunt section, but nvm)

What I liked

yomiuri komachi screenshot 1All the questions are moderated before being posted, and answers seem to be moderated as well. That means both questions and answers are almost always polite, well-formed and easy to read and understand. No flaming, no vulgarity or cursing or l33tspeak or excessive slang. It’s done wonders for my written Japanese, and I’ve learned lots of proverbs and sayings as well.

Getting updates and clarification from the original poster. Most traditional agony aunt column have the aunt give the answer and then that settles it. Sometimes there are comment sections where the readers can chip in, but you still don’t hear back from the poster about whether the advice helped or not.

Why I’m quitting

yomiuri komachi screenshot 2– Original poster updates are on the decline. It used to be that most posters were at least polite enough to come back and say “Thanks for the advice” even if they ended up not using it, but now they just post the question and disappear forever. Was the advice good? Did it help any? What happened? It’s like having a movie cut off in the middle. So frustrating!

-Too many defensive thread posters. It’s annoying when people post questions intended to serve as a rubber stamp for their own opinions. “I wasn’t wrong to do Terrible Thing X, was I?” Even if 200 posts follow telling them they were wrong, they either just ignore the thread, pick out the few ones that agree with them or argue endlessly that they’re right. It’s the rare, rare poster whose mind is swayed and can admit they’re wrong when they obviously are.

-Too many indecisive posters. They post the problem. They get advice. They don’t want to take the advice, so they keep coming up with objections. They’re called “でもでもだって” because they’re always finding excuses to everything.

e.g You want to get married, your boyfriend says he won’t marry you. “Find someone else” the advisers say. “But, but, I love him. But, but, what if there’s nobody else? But, but, what if he changes his mind? But, but…” And it just goes on and on and on. Same with people dealing with mooches or pushy neighbors, it’s always “But, but I don’t want to hurt their feelings. But, but I don’t want to make things awkward” and on and on. Nowadays I avoid those “my boyfriend won’t marry me” (and it’s always the boyfriends, wonder why) threads on principle because the woman almost never leaves. She just hangs in there going “But but” until everyone loses interest and goes away.

yomiuri komachi screenshot 3-Too much divorce advocacy. It seems like more and more the only answer people have for any problem involving marriage is “Leave him!” or “Leave her!” Some of the issues are very serious, to be sure, especially those involving domestic violence. But the vast majority of problems can be solved with time, patience, communication and counselling. Especially when there are kids involved, there’s no way just moving out is the best solution.

-And it’s like the users don’t even consider separation as an option, they always leap straight to divorce, like it’s so easy. And yet those same users are super-critical of questions from divorcees and single parents. I mean only a fool would divorce someone just because people on the internet told them to, but the irresponsibility of the posters who would even suggest such a thing makes me shake my head. God hates divorce.

-Overall loosening of morals in general. In the past 4 years I’ve been reading Yomiuri Komachi, I’ve noticed a general loosening of standards, especially when it comes to romantic relationships. When I started reading, the overwhelming mood towards couples living together before marriage was negative. Don’t do it, it’s immoral, you’re wasting your time, just get married already, etc. All good advice. But recently it’s swung in the opposite direction. The number opposing it has gone way down, and those opposing it for moral as opposed to “He won’t marry you” reasons are close to zero.

yomiuri komachi logo-On similar note, in a recent thread a woman refused to sleep with a guy after the first date. Not only were there people in the thread saying she was being too hard-nosed but also almost all the responses assumed that she would be okay with sleeping with a guy she wasn’t married to if he would just ask her out first, or if they had gone on a few more dates instead of just one. The criticism directed at people who get pregnant before marriage has also gone way down – which is obvious since they’re basically encouraging people to jump into the sack with people they barely know. Such a huge decline in only four years, which makes me think it will only get worse in future.

tl;dr It was fun to read at first, but now the frustration outweighs the fun. Either I’m more sensitive to moral issues now thanks to the Spirit or there’s been a decline in morals, so it’s not as enjoyable to read. Reading stuff with people praising evil and putting down good is bad for spiritual growth, so it would be better for me to find a Christian advice forum and read the questions over there instead of expecting Biblical advice from non-believers. I’m done with Komachi Yomiuri.

No Sweat Cantonese book review

I hadn’t read the AllJapaneseAlltheTime blog for a while, but I popped in about a month ago and one of the recent posts kind of pricked my conscience a little bit. Why Are you Acting like a Deadbeat Dad Language Learner? the title goes, and it talks about abandoning a language as soon as you’re halfway good in it. Th…that’s like me and Cantonese, I thought uncomfortably.

The truth is, I’d managed to get to a semi-decent point in Cantonese. I don’t have any language partners so I can’t speak a lick, but I’ve gotten to the place where I can get the gist and sometimes more than just the gist of what people are talking about on news broadcasts, in dramas and on RTHK 2 programs (off-topic, but does anyone else have difficulty live-streaming RTHK? I have to use the RTHK on the Go app on my phone to get the broadcasts.) Right about then I kind of ran out of Canto movies I wanted to watch and music I wanted to listen to, and it became a chore hunting for HK dramas that aren’t dubbed into Mandarin, so I just kinda threw the whole thing over and walked away. I still listen to RTHK a few times a week, watch Guangdong TV from time to time and listen to Cantopop quite frequently, but with nowhere near the energy I used to.

no sweat cantonese contentsBut since the AJATT post stirred me up, I decided to at least go through my bulging folder of Canto-learning material I’d always meant to read but never got round it. There’s quite a bit of, and I’ll try to tackle at least one or two sets a month but first up, No Sweat Cantonese: A Fun Guide to Speaking Correctly by Amy Leung. That was a long intro, wasn’t it? ^_^;; A-anyway, the blurb:

The long awaited textbook from one of the most popular and successful teachers of Cantonese. Amy Leung teaches Cantonese to managers of multinational corporations in Hong Kong in a fun new way. No Sweat Cantonese distils her approach, fulfilling the demand for an up-to-date textbook focusing on the practical needs of expatriates in Hong Kong and elsewhere in the Cantonese-speaking world. Like never before, Cantonese – “that impossible language!” is now easy and enjoyable to learn. Includes CD with pronunciation aid and full-length conversations.

The presence of audio was the selling point for me, because Cantonese is one language where it really helps to hear stuff spoken. There are sooo many homonyms in this language, it’s crazy. But anyway, since I spent so much time on the intro I’m going to put the actual review in point form to save time and hopefully stop myself rambling like I am so wont to do.

no sweat cantonese grammar notesThe good

  • Starts with a rather good pronunciation guide and using a romanization guide that makes sounding things out easy to do.
  • Vocabulary lists with hanzi at the start of every chapter.
  • Dialogues provided are short and easy to follow/repeat.
  • There’s a helpful appendix at the back with even more vocabulary, all voiced.
  • Lots of cultural notes and suggestions about places to go and things to do there, making this a good guide for people who intend to visit Hong Kong in the near future.

The bad

  • A bit too elementary for an intermediate learner like me. No Sweat Cantonese is better suited for those just starting out, preferably with the aid of a teacher.
  • There are a lot of careless typos, including one right on the contents page (see proof above).
  • Inconsistent typesetting annoys me. The typesetter will randomly change fonts on the same page and put accents on English words and numbers where they don’t belong at all.
  • The vocabulary comes with hanzi but the dialogues and chit-chat lines don’t, so there’s an extra step involved if you want to enter them into an SRS or put them on a card. It’s not too bad for an intermediate user because none of it uses complicated dialogue, but for someone just starting it out it can be intimidating. Again you’re better off working with a teacher.

tl;dr, I didn’t get too much out of it. The vocabulary lists are the best part, but I have an aversion to entering just words/characters into my SRS unless they’re in a sentence where they’re used in context, and the sentences in this book came without hanzi and I was too lazy to write them out from scratch so… yeah. At $30 on Amazon it’s a bit pricey for what you’ve get, but if you’ve got all the other Canto textbooks and need something to round out your collection and fill in a few vocab gaps it’s not a bad buy. Still, No Sweat Cantonese is probably most useful for current and future expats who have access to a language teacher and just need a structured textbook to help them through.

I found a new Cantonese TV livestream – Guangdong TV!

It’s been a while since I last posted about my Cantonese learning adventures. First I took a break from posting about it, then in the past 6 months or so I haven’t learned much at all. The reasons for that are both myriad and nebulous. What matters is that I’m finally back in the saddle and ready to take my studies seriously once more.

Thanks to the unfortunate break I have once again reverted to an intermediate-level learner just when I was on the verge of breaking through to advanced. But I learned all that stuff once and I can learn it again if I just focus my energies in the right direction. And since I do find just reading (or trying to read) about Cantonese boring, not to mention I like the sound rather than the sight of that particular language, it’s time to go back to finding good media to listen to or watch.

The bad news is, the ATV stream I used to watch all those terrible dramas on has apparently gone down for good. Boo, hiss. In fact I wondered for a second whether the company itself was still in business, but apparently they are. The good news is, I found another Cantonese TV station to watch: Guangdong TV! Yay~ I’ll even share the link with you: http://www.wcetv.com/asx/LIB/LIB106170_v5.asx

Since Guangdong is part of Mainland China and has historically been under their rule, I hear their Cantonese is more heavily influenced by Mandarin than Hong Kong/Macau Cantonese is, but a beggar like me hardly has a choice. I’ve only watched a little bit of it, but the commercials at least are in normal Cantonese, and that’s the best part of watching TV, right? ^_^ So I’m in a really good mood right now, yay!