Spoonfed Chinese: missing audio files; should I make my own?

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Hi all. I’m using AnkiMobile on the iPhone. I’ve been using the free Spoonfed Chinese deck for the past year or so. I’m sync’d with AnkiWeb, but both my phone and Ankiweb (PC) decks are missing about half of the mp3s (in spoken Chinese) referenced on the cards.

Until recently I’ve been okay with this problem, as I like using the deck to practice reading as much as listening. But in recent weeks I’ve become increasingly concerned with practicing listening and speaking, and obviously the abscence of about half the audio isn’t helpful. Anyway, I have several questions now:

  1. Is there an easy fix for this – some way to download the missing MP3s and add them to my deck?
  2. If it is feasible to download the missing mp3s, would doing so mess up my progress in any way? I’ve worked through about 40% of the 8000-plus cards in the deck.
  3. If I can’t find the MP3s, I suppose I could use a TTS engine to generate audio for the missing cards. (I use Microsoft Azure for that and can do batch-generation.) If I did this, how would I add the audio to the cards?
  4. Alternatively, I could just start my own custom listening deck, using sentences relevant to my own life, experience and interests. In fact, I’ve already started making custom listen-and-repeat (quasi-shadowing) playlists for EverMusic, and I think I get better listening practice using that technique than Anki, especially because I’m particularly motivated to recognize and speak sentences relevant to my own life. But Anki does have SRS, whereas using an audio player requires me to decide when to review stuff, which isn’t optimal.

Any thoughts? Many thanks in advance.

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You don’t need those remaining cards. You can use the ones from the iKnow! deck, or make your own with sentence mining setups.

As for shadowing, I’d keep it separate from spaced repetition. Shadowing is for improving pronunciation and speaking skills; you don’t need to memorize the sentences.

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Thanks for your reply! That looks like a nice deck. I like the images and, especially, the sample sentences. I want lots of sample sentences. Still, I might prefer to make a custom deck tailored to me. I’ll think on it.

Thanks also for the advice on shadowing. That makes sense.

I’d also like to experiment with cloze cards, to help my active recall. Clozemaster does this; I just now downloaded the app onto my phone. When speaking Chinese with my tutor, I often falter as I search to recall a word. Recognizing Chinese from flashcards helps a bit, but it’s not the same as actively generating the Chinese word when I’m under time pressure. Obviously practice with my tutor helps a lot here, but it’d be great to practice that skill offline too.

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