My Audio Flashcards

5.2020 Go to theVocab/Flashcard page. I’ve found some Navajo instructors who are creating flashcard decks with audio. Very very useful!!

I am in the process of making more flashcards to study Navajo vocabulary and sentences. It has been really helpful to use this trick from Spanish-Only to add the Lapahie audio to my Anki flashcards. I added content somewhat haphazardly in the beginning because I was excited that Spanish Only’s trick actually worked for me! So now I am going through flashcards that really don’t interest me; I don’t concentrate on them as much as I want to. So now during my reviews I delete words and phrases I don’t really care for.

I am thinking of other things to add to the deck that I would be interested in learning. Vocabulary of course…there is also that list of 100 most common words I am still working on. I also am going to add most of the sentences found in Breakthrough Navajo along with the audio I ripped from the cassette.

The plan is to add the text with the audio in the primary fact field then the English equivalent in the secondary fact field (as pictured). Pretty standard, but I have thought of two other ways to format my Anki flashcards.

The first format is to include audio-only in the primary fact field of my cards. Spanish-Only’s recent blog post provided an audio only Anki deck for the French learners. This somewhat confirmed to me that this audio-only thing was an idea worth pursuing. I knew it was completely possible to add audio to my decks if I were to use Anki on my desktop, but I use Anki on my iPod touch more often… and in reading the tutorial for adding media to an iPhone/iPod I found out that MP3s were the only file supported. That isn’t a problem when I add the Breakthough Navajo audio, but the audio files from Lapahie are all WAV files. Bummer. Well, I tried it out anyway….and it worked! Perhaps I should contact the programmer to update his tutorial. So I will be adding more audio to flashcards.

The second format I want to include in my deck will first feature a phrase or question in the first fact field, with the appropriate response to the question in the secondary field. So for example, in the primary field, “How are you?” and in the secondary field, “I am well”. All, of course, in Navajo. Breakthrough Navajo has a lot these question and answer phrases; and having the audio makes it even better. I guess the idea kind of came about when I was listening to my Pimsleur lesson in the car; quite a few of the lessons feature this question and answer format. So I thought I would apply that to my Navajo study. I am looking into purchasing the second installment of Breakthrough Navajo called Speak Navajo for more audio phrases.

The only downside to this is the time it takes to actually sit down and get everything organized. It has gotten progressively busy for me in the last month with work and school; which is the reason for this late-in-the-week post. But with my limited time Liz Learns had a really good idea on how to go about adding content to Anki regularly. Liz suggests sticking post-its and going back later to type them into Anki. No need to do everything in one sitting, I think I would go crazy. Great idea, Liz. Time well spent.

If you are unfamiliar with Anki I would suggest reading the Want to Remember Everything You’ll Ever Learn? article by Wired Magazine that introduced me to SRS. The article refers to Supermemo which is another program for SRS, I use Anki…but there are other programs as well.