Finished the FSI Cantonese Anki deck (a sort of review)

As I wrote a few posts ago, I’m mostly dropping Cantonese in 2021. However I don’t want to lose my progress entirely over the course of the year, so I’ll still be reviewing my Anki deck cards and Memrise lessons, reading and watching a little Cantonese here and there, that sort of thing. Shortly before Christmas 2020, I finished up the FSI Cantonese Anki deck, so I figured I should say a few words about it here, this being my language blog in addition to anime/manga. However did I make any progress from it? I think I did, but it’s hard to tell because:

  1. I have no objective standard for marking my progress. I didn’t take any tests before, or try to understand something and fail etc. There’s no way to do an effective “Before and After.”
  2. I didn’t use the FSI deck exclusively. I also used a Cantonese vocabulary deck, the Cantonese conversations at OPLingo (fantastic resource, try it for sure), Peppa Pig in Cantonese and a bunch of other resources. After all it took months to complete the FSI deck, so it didn’t make sense to stick to one resource exclusively.
  3. The FSI Cantonese Anki deck is pretty basic. I’ve been studying the language long enough that most of it was old-hat in terms of vocabulary and structure.

So while I do feel I improved a bit in Cantonese listening comprehension and reading comprehension last year, I can’t give the FSI Cantonese deck any solo credit for helping me get better. I will say three things though.

  1. It’s a good resource for reading written Cantonese. I’ve lost track of the number of materials I’ve seen with Mandarin/Standard Chinese subtitles or text. That’s how it’s done on a native level, but it’s not helpful for beginners at all. I mean eventually you’ll have to adapt to listening in one language and reading in another, but in the early stages, a pure Cantonese resource is great.
  2. It’s also a good resource for understanding Cantonese spoken at close to regular speed. There’s a good mix of both men and women chatting about a variety of everyday topics without making the dialogues feel excessively “manufactured.” Though the conversations never really “go” anywhere. They’re just snippets, so if you want full conversations, check the OPLingo site I linked earlier.
  3. There still aren’t many Cantonese materials aimed at the intermediate-to-advanced learner. And especially not those that include both audio and an accurate text transcript. And doubly-especially not free and still available. So there’s no reason not to use this deck if you can find it.

Here is the Anki link. As I often say for Cantonese, you don’t exactly have a lot of options, so you might as well take what you can get.

In contrast, I just picked up a couple of good Korean decks because I’ve almost exhausted all of Evita’s decks and finished the Hanja deck as well. I’ve had so little to review lately that I’ve been doing more and more of the Spoonfed Chinese deck I said I was putting on hold. But that changes today. Back to learning more Korean so I can read promising series like “The Emperor Reverses Time” and “The Villainess is a Marionette” without having to deal with scanlation drama. See ya!

 

Trying to learn Mandarin with the Spoonfed Chinese Anki deck

Exactly what it says in the title – I’m thinking of learning Mandarin Chinese and I’ve found a promising tool for it. Anki is a spaced repetition system that helps you memorize stuff, Google it. And in addition to uploading your own sentences, you can also download pre-made decks where people have compiled and shared their vocabulary lists, sentences, etc. I’m already using four of these intermittently for Korean and Cantonese:

FSI Cantonese
Cantonese Words
Korean Grammar Sentences by Evita
Korean 한자어 Vocabulary Builder (Sino-Korean words)

Now I just added one more: SpoonFed Chinese. 8000+ Mandarin sentences supposedly arranged in order of difficulty so they regularly introduce new vocabulary items and grammar concepts. The idea is that by the time you work through the whole deck, you will have a ton of vocabs and grammar as well as reading and listening practice so you will be functionally competent in Mandarin.

Does it work? I googled around for a bit, but didn’t get enough results to prove it. Most people who use the SpoonFed Chinese deck do so with a number of other resources, and those who said they would use it exclusively have never reported back on their results. I myself plan to use it exclusively at first, but will branch out into other stuff if I find Mandarin interesting enough to stick with.

Full disclaimer: I’m not a complete beginner at Mandarin Chinese. I took a semester of Chinese in college ages ago and I’ve been learning Cantonese for many years now. I would say I’m an upper beginner in Mandarin and maybe medium-intermediate in Cantonese? So if I come back months later and say “Hey, look at all these cool things I can do with Mandarin now!” you should know that I didn’t start from zero. I.e. “results may not be typical.”

Before I go, I should answer the question no one is asking: why Mandarin, and why now? I took that semester in Chinese in college and dropped it because I wasn’t very interested in China or in Chinese culture. And I’m still not, not really. But in the past year I’ve been reading more Chinese webtoons and romance web novels, and some of them are pretty fun.

I’m really grateful to the companies and fan translators who make it possible for me to enjoy the better series (especially the non-rapey, non-abusive prince/CEO titles, which are like 1 in a million). At the same time, sometimes you see a series on NovelUpdates and it has over 1000 chapters… but only 10 are translated. Case in point, The Delicate Prince and His Shrewd Peasant Consort.

I appreciate the free translations, but in the 2.5+ years it would take for this series to be fully translated, I’m pretty sure I could learn enough Chinese to read it for myself. Assuming I put in a lot of hard work and didn’t lose motivation, which is a big “assuming.” Which is also why I’m not spending money on many resources or books or anything. Just SpoonFed Chinese to begin with, then we’ll see.

How often will I update on this pet project? Not very often, because I’m not that serious about it. Korean and Cantonese still come first before Mandarin. Let’s aim for either updates every 6 months or every 10% of the deck, whichever comes first. Either way it will be a fun experiment, so look forward to the results!

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!