Onsei Anki: Anki plugin for pitch accent practice

This addon helps you practice your Japanese pitch accent while you do your Anki reps on audio sentence cards !

It will compare your own recording with the card's sentence audio and show you where your intonation differed from it.

Under the hood, it is using my Onsei project. Check it out for the technical details.

IMPORTANT NOTE: THIS IS STILL A WORK IN PROGRESS, PLEASE REPORT ANY ISSUE AND SHARE IMPROVEMENT IDEAS !

Setup

For now, the following instructions have only been tested on Ubuntu Linux and with Anki 2.1.35.

1. Copy the onsei_anki folder into the Anki addons folder.

• On Windows: C:\Users\<YOUR_USER_NAME>\AppData\Roaming\Anki2\addons21
• On Linux: ~/.local/share/Anki2/addons21
• On MacOS: ~/Library/Application Support/Anki2/addons21

2. Run Anki

3. Configure the addon: go to the Addons menu (Ctrl+Shift+A), select Onsei and click on Config

• Add to decks the name of the decks for which you have sentence audio cards.
• Add to sentence_audio_fields the name of the fields where you put your sentence audio.
• Add to sentence_transcript_fields the name of the fields where you put your sentence transcription.

4. Restart Anki (for the changes in the configuration to apply)

Usage

• When reviewing a card, press Shift+v to record yourself, then click the Save button to validate (or Esc to cancel).
• The addon will automatically reveal the answer and display a graph comparing your intonation to the sentence audio.
• You can press r to re-listen to the sentence audio, or v to re-listen to your audio

Here are two ways you can use it:

• Repeating or shadowing exercise on Audio sentence cards (audio on front, text on back)
• Reading exercise on Text Sentence cards (text on front, audio on back)

Running the API locally

By default, the addon will connect to an instance of Onsei API running on a distant server.

If you want to run it locally, use the following command (on Linux):

docker run --network=host itsupera/onsei-api

and change api_url to http://127.0.0.1:8000 in the addon's configuration.

Refer to the Onsei project for more details about the API.

Troubleshooting

If your problem is not described below, please report it in the Onsei community chat

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Q: Graphs keep showing up even after I clicked the close button !

A: If you don't want to see the graphs anymore, disable the addon (Open Addons menu with Ctrl+Shift+A, select "Onsei" and click Disable) then restart Anki.

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Q: I always get an "Error" when I record myself

A: Try to speak closer to your microphone, eliminate background noises and make a short pause before and after you speak. I might also be because the sentence audio has some background noise itself, such as a BGM.

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Q: Those graphs are too big !

A: You can configure the size by changing the graph_height_in_pixels value in the addon configuration screen (Open Addons menu with Ctrl+Shift+A, select "Onsei" and click Config)