Updated: 2019.05.29

This article was supposed to be one in a series of posts documenting my Mandarin learning journey. I’ve stopped to learn the language but I still think that the Anki deck presented in this post is valuable for anyone who whishes to trully learn the phonetics of the language. You can find the deck in ankiweb and the source code in github.

The previous post can be found in here.

The goal of this post is to explain the stuff I considered into the creation of an Anki deck to learn Chinese phonetics.

First, some terminology. Mandarin syllables can be divided into two parts: an (optional) initial part and a final part.

Mandarin initials and finals are quite different to many sounds (phonemes) found in English (or Spanish, in my case). So, learning initials and finals in isol…

Updated: 2019.05.29

Few years ago, in 2016, I started to learn Chinese, but I very quickly realised what a humongous task it was. I had planned to document my whole journey into learning a new language but reality struck hard. So, here I am, updating this for the first time in years to tell you that I did not learn much Chinese with the methodology, I wanted to use, and opted for something less hard core, something that takes me 30 minutes a day. So far, so good. I have tried hard to learn the sounds of the language, some grammar, some basic phrases, and I have gone full into hearing conversations.

Original article:

This article is part of a series of posts on my Chinese learning experience, for more information visit the main series page

Here are the web pages I found useful when reading …

Welcome to my log! I intend to write here my progress while I learn Chinese from zero. That means, I will try to track my progress in this post (or list of posts), the tools I use, the tools I make, my worries and difficulties and what I learn in the process.

I hope I will see in 1 or 2 years to this post and say, well… you did something with your “free” time.

So, after spending 1 week searching for resources to study Chinese, I came up with this study plan:

1. Search for information and read the most I can about the basics of the language, which means to read: wikipedia, blogs, books and their commentaries, … (time spent in this step: few days to few weeks)
2. Study pronunciation of Chinese Mandarin, it’s a tricky language, with many weird sounds (zhi, chi, zi, ci, ji and qi sound incredibly s…

This article is based in an essay I wrote for an English class in the second semester of 2015

The first time I heard somebody was studying Deaf Sign Language was from my auntie. It seems that the city is giving free classes to learn the Colombian Deaf Sign Language. But what is a Deaf Sign Language?.

Before searching a little in Internet, I thought that the Deaf Sign Language was a language constructed mapping words from a Hearing Language, like Spanish, to hand gestures. This means, I thought, they only use a different set of skills to carry the words they are making, just like writing requires a different set of skills to what speaking requires, thus using the same Spanish grammar as I use. So, basically, if you want to learn Sign Language, I thought, you only need to learn to write or s…

Edit: 2016-08-02

I found a simpler, built-in in ffmpeg aproach to split a sound/video file in multiple parts with the same time length.

ffmpeg -i 'input_file.mp3' \
       -acodec copy -vcodec copy \
       -f segment -segment_time 600 \
       '%03d_out_name.mp3'

In this example we have an input file called input_file.mp3 and we break it in multiple files of 10 minutes each (600 seconds). Each output file has a unique name of the form: XXX_out_name.mp3 where XXX represents a 3 digit number.

As a reference, the old article:

The present article describes how to split a video/sound into multiple files of same duration using ffmpeg. Click to download automated bash script.

With ffmpeg, to copy just a fraction of a sound (.mp3, .wma, .aac, …) or video file (.mp4, .wma, …) use:

ffmpeg -i "…