Anki Assault / Piano Practice

 Education, Japanese Language, Music, Technology  Comments Off on Anki Assault / Piano Practice
Sep 102013
 

In order to get ready for both the N1 and the A+ exams, I’m going all out on Anki for the next few weeks. I’ve just finished setting up a bunch of workbook practice sheets for Anki, thanks to e.Typist. It lets me OCR stuff and get it into Anki relatively painlessly.

For A+ material, if the book I bought is in PDF format, it’s easy to just copy/paste the text into Anki. But if it’s a Kindle book, then I have to use something like Greenshot, which take a photo of the page, OCRs it, and adds it to the clipboard. Then I just have to paste it into Anki.

Really, it would be a lot easier if these publishers just gave us text files. I paid for the book. It’s not like I’m going to give away the contents. I just want to turn it into flashcards I can use.

Also, I finally upgraded to Anki 2.0. I’ve been putting that off forever, but it’s finally time to bite the bullet. The transition took a couple of days to get ironed out completely, but now I don’t even notice the differences. The differences are there, and the workflow is pretty different, but things I used to complain about don’t seem like such a big deal to me anymore. As long as it’s fast, that’s all I care about.

Oh, Piano Class started tonight. That was a lot of fun. The Piano Lit class afterwards was interesting, too. I’m pretty ignorant when it comes to piano music. My background is in marching bands, concert bands, and jazz bands. So I don’t know much about classical piano music. But it’s interesting.

Buying Japanese Software Online

 Japanese Language, Technology  Comments Off on Buying Japanese Software Online
Aug 102012
 

Download versions of Japanese software are available in large quantities these days from online software vendors that have sprung up all over the place. Not all publishers are on board, but many are.

I finally took the time to get a copy of my favorite Japanese OCR software, e.Typist 14.0. Rather than import it and pay shipping, I bought a copy from an online software site called Vector, downloaded it and registered it.

Here’s the deal: you can find some good software this way for cheap. It’s legal, and you save a ton on shipping. (You’ll still get crushed by exchange rates if you’re unlucky enough to use dollars, though.)

There’s a BIG caveat: If you don’t know how to read Japanese, don’t waste your time. Seriously. Don’t.

For starters, the website be in Japanese.

You have a translator app to turn it all into English? Well, will your translator website also translate the program for you as you run it? Probably not.

I’d say the only exceptions would be for things like games or Vocaloid soundbanks. Even then, installation is going to be painful at times, and a Japanese Vocaloid soundbank is really only useful if you’re going to use it for Japanese. Yes, there are people who can force them to do English, but English has many more sounds than the Japanese soundbanks have… and I’m digressing big time.

I really love e.Typist, by the way. It’s a great program for doing Japanese Language OCR.

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