I’ve written about it. In posts, in comments, on Twitter and in personal e-mails to some readers. I even got a light form of RSI because of adding a sh*tload of sentences. But! After weeks and weeks of working on the perfect system for you all, especially adding content, I can say the sentence database is ready!
Back in 2007, when I started to get serious about learning Spanish there was one major problem to really progress; a sentence database. That’s why I’ve come up with the idea of compiling a big Spanish-English database with only the things you need: bilingual sentences.
Sure, you can get Spanish-English sentences from any place, but not in one place which grows day after day. That’s why I’m offering this sentence database for free.
I hereby proudly present the Spanish-English Sentence Database (SESD). You can find it at http://sentences.spanish-only.com.
Now you may wonder why I didn’t make a Anki deck and just share it over the internal system Anki uses. I’ve been thinking about that but decided to not do it. I strongly believe in the theory that one will only learn a language well if they learn things they really want to learn.
Besides that, you first need to learn an item before entering it to your SRS. Reviewing items is just to not forget the things you already learned.
So far the webapp is pretty basic. There’s no option to look for infinitives and the search engines won’t change the gender of a word to give back more results.
For example: if you’re searching for tener you won’t see a sentence that contains tendré. Also, if you’re looking for bueno you won’t get back results containing buena.
This is because I use a rather simple search algorithm. Sure, I could expand the search function or add something like tags to offer more search options, but this would bring me more work when adding sentences.
For now I prefer getting the content (read: the sentences) out and let you (the user) play around a bit with the search function to get the desired results. After all, without much content but with a superb search engine you won’t get back good results anyway; the content isn’t there. On the other hand; with an avarage search engine but a huge database you can get massive results if you know the system a bit better.
As you may have seen is the system still in beta. This means that I’ll be doing some tweaking over the next few weeks and that for at least a month you can expect the database to grow fast. After that I’ll still be adding sentences but just not as fast. My ultimate goal is to have at least 10,000 sentences online, but I’d like that number to be a bit higher.
I know that there are quite some Spanish speakers that read this blog to improve their English. They can use this database as well, but I’d recommend them to put the English sentence on the front of their SRS items and the Spanish sentence on the back. As most sentences come from sources for native English speakers that are learning English, many English sentences in the database are quite complicated. This is actually perfect for anyone being serious about learning English.
For everyone that is already using monolingual items only there’s still a way for them to use the database. Instead of getting both the Spanish and English sentence from the database they simply use one of the sentences and make the back of the card themselves. This saves 50% in work!
If you have feedback or want to help me adding sentences you can always drop me a line or post a comment to this post. If not I hope you enjoy the database and that it’ll help you with your Spanish (or English) studies!
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Ramses, great database you’re putting together here. I joined Babelhut in blogging about it here.
One question: Is there an easy way to get these into an SRS?
Ramses, this is AWESOME! Hands down it beats the “word list” I had written you about. I still use my list (just something I do), but now I can try and match up the words with the sentences in the data base. Really gives me some great practice in vocabulary, and at the same time (the most important part) using in a sentence. Thanks again for this added benefit.
@Street-Smart Language Learning
Not yet, but I’m not done yet with the coding. Also, I need to see how to easily make a .anki file that doesn’t replace your old deck but rather just adds the sentences to it.
@David
.
I’m still expanding the database, but I’m happy you like it
the easiest way to merge a bunch of sentences into an existing anki deck would be to just create an import.txt file
front; back
front2; back2
…
and import it into your own deck. You can use \t (tab) characters instead of semicolons in case you have semicolons in the text somewhere.
On that note, Ramses, is it possible to simply get a text file or spreadsheet of your sentence list?
Thanks for your work, this is going to be a valuable resource!
The only way to get it into a file (at the moment) is generating a database backup which will just generate a bunch of crap around the sentences, because of which you can’t use it.
And I don’t like it doing that way. If I wanted people to simply import a huge database I’d have made an Anki deck. But I’vepeople seen importing (for Japanese) the iKnow database, and they didn’t learn anything because they weren’t able to learn the sentence first and didn’t add sentences they really wanted to learn.
Also, this database is for people that learn Spanish and still use English sentences, people that learn English and learn Spanish sentences, people that learn Spanish/English without the use of the other sentence.
By looking for words and phrases you WANT to learn, instead of just thinking you HAVE to learn them you’re actually learning. So no, I won’t provide the whole database in a textfile so that people can import it into Anki (making that file is kinda impossible at the moment) and are going to fail.