General Anki-SRS Application for Any Language?

Do you know any good Anki-SRS based application that works for any language?

I was trying to find an application for my friend who is learning Italian, but I am not satisfied with the SRS system and lack of automatic input in the most popular Anki apps, and I was unable to find anything better. There are tons of these types of applications for Japanese (HouHou, Kitsun, Torii, Kanimanabu), but unfortunately the Japenese words have to be in kanji or kana, so it does not work with Italian. Do you have any recommendations? :smiley:

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On Kitsun you don’t have to use a Japanese setting.


And when adding a card you would simply not choose the Japanese-specific templates.

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This might be a stupid question, but what’s wrong with Anki itself?

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I’m not familiar enough with learning applications beside WK and Anki to give concrete suggestions but I think it would be helpful to others if you elaborated more on these points.

Ah! Perfect, I did not know. I will try it for sure :smiley:

Ok here is some elaboration: I did not like that you have to “show answer” instead of just typing and seeing if you got it right. Morover, the SRS is not what I prefer. I prefer WaniKani or BunPro style, where you get incremental time each time you get it right, but you either get it right or wrong. With Anki and AnkiWeb (as far as I have used it), you type “Repeat”, “Hard”, “Good” or “Easy”, which determines how long it will be until next review. I would much prefer the WaniKani style SRS.

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^ elaborated here :slight_smile:

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As far as I know Anki has incremental delay. “Hard”, “Good” or “Easy” determines the size of the increment in delay. They are not fixed sized delays.

That’s exactly what they said, and they do not like that format.

That format forces the learner to attempt to be objective about their recollection on every single item, which is a large burden and makes it unreliable imo. Plus it’s just annoying to have to do for every item.

Having an unchanging math formula that determines your SRS leveling and delay for each item, as in most web-based SRS sites, is much more reliable for an end user, and many of them still allow customizing the increment growth for each level if the user wants that level of control.

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You could just ignore the hard and easy buttons if you want to treat it as yes/no…

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@TobyOne, feel free to drop a message on Kitsun’s thread or on Kitsun’s discord if you need any help :v:

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Web-based SRS doesn’t use binary outcomes for determining level changes – it uses the number of incorrect answers. The more incorrect answers, the greater impact to your level, depending on the original level. WaniKani has a post about this if you are unfamiliar with how web-based SRS typically works. This is effectively equivalent to Anki’s recollection options, except the system evaluates the recollection objectively instead of the user attempting to do so. Therefore, “ignore Anki’s recollection evaluation” isn’t good advice as this then makes Anki even worse while not bringing it up to par with web-based SRS.

Edit: “Web-based SRS” as in “most SRS apps are web apps and use systems similar to WaniKani’s unlike Anki which is on the desktop and doesn’t use a WK-style system” so it’s much easier to say “web-based SRS” than the latter, but seemingly I have to clarify based on the replies. :roll_eyes: Obviously the system being web-based has no bearing on the formula or logic used to evaluate recollection; it just so happens that virtually all web-based SRS falls into this category (including the numerous SRS apps I’ve built, which you can find on my GitHub if you’re interested in seeing how leveling is determined based on performance).

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I don’t see how any system can figure out automatically whether you found an item particularly easy or hard to remember at a given attempt given a yes/no response – that’s a property of your brain the algorithm has no access to. So it seems to me like you’re just saying you think anki’s particular algorithm isn’t as good (eg that it doesn’t make as good use as it might of knowledge about the past history of answers), which may well be true but is unrelated to whether the user gives the srs a yes/no or a 1-5 or whatever (which in turn is unrelated to whether an srs is web based or not).

With anki, it’s actually possible to only have the pas/fail option and not the easy/hard option. Another thing you can do is that you keep the easy & hard option, but you make them both give the same increment as normal. That might sound pointless, as each option would then have the card show up in the same amount of imte, but it’s good to delve into the stats and you can see if you had an exceptionally hard or easy time. If many things are going hard, maybe ease a bit on how many new flashcards you are learning each day :slight_smile:

Finally: You can also change the cart type so you have to type in the answer! You still have to decide for yourself if you got it right or wrong, but anki can show you which letters you got right and wrong / are missing (e.g. if you miss an obscure reading in Japanese, you can still accept the answer based on your own judgement).

How it looks for me:

Checking my answer (I was putting in the kana, used よ instead of ゆ to show how it marks mistakes):

Typing in my answer looks like this:

Change the easy bonus and hard interval both to 1.0 so your cards will always show up at the same time as a card for which you selected normal:

The great thing about Anki is that it’s very customisable. It takes a bit of googling and configuration to get it set-up, but then the sky is the limit (and it syncs across all your devices, so you change the card types for a deck once, to make them ‘type in the answer’ cards, and it’s done for all cards of that type in a deck across your computer/tablet/smartphone/webpage etc. when you sync it).

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Thank you!

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