iknow/ smart.fm

[m_]

Do you have a smart.fm account? How is it good?
I have created an account but I don't see how it helps in learning Japanese.
Is it only to create vocabulary lists and sentences, sorta like writing notes?
What other interesting features does the site have?
How has the site helped you?
Please share with me!

[Sairana]

It looks great, and the iKnow application works wonderfully well. I got to the application directly from a Hiragana Times e-mail. It's an SRS like Anki, though at least for the Hiragana Times posts, they have good audio. The quizzing is pretty well done, too.

However, that's the extent of my experience with the site. Navigation for newbies there is extremely annoying, and has soured me on the site several times in the past. Just a little bit ago I made another serious attempt at getting around, and I still don't know what the heck I'm supposed to do.

[furrykef]

I use it for grabbing complete sentences with sound examples and putting them into Anki. I don't really use the rest of the site. For example, if I want to learn the word 運転手, I search the site for that word and look at any sentences made by Cerego -- I don't trust sentences made by anybody else unless I know they're native or native-level speakers -- and see if there are any sentences that are at around my level -- that is, with maybe only one other new word I don't know or only one grammatical principle I'm not familiar with. If you try to learn too much new stuff in one sentence, it will take you forever to get it right. (I should know, because I have great difficulty with my Japanese flash cards as it is. I figure it'll eventually get easier, though...) You can also just browse the sentences in the lessons and just pick 'em up one by one, as I plan to do after I finish JFBP and JFE.

I'm very big on using sound examples for Japanese sentences, so I just take the sound clips from the site and put them in Anki. It's pretty easy to do... just right-click the Play button, paste the URL into Notepad (or the address bar of your browser, or some other convenient place), and you'll get something like this:

http://assets1.smart.fm/assets/legacy/J ... 1216463636

Now chop off the ?1216463636 part (for some reason it won't work if you don't) and copy/paste that into Anki, and it will be transformed into [sound:blahblahblah.mp3] and it will be put into your deck, just like that! You don't even have to save the clip to your hard drive.

- Kef