Guys, I just.... I think I hate ANKI. Help me like it?

I’ve had an Anki account forever and a day (maybe years) and only started to use it literally last week. I’m on level 10 and needed more review of what wanikani SRS is willing to give me so I tried making my own card deck… I was successful in making the card deck and it really helped only problem is that I can’t figure out how to review my cards again after I tapped them green. I think there is a way but I’m way too lazy to figure it out. I’ve tried some of the shared decks but for my puposes I want to study only the kanji and vocab that I personally am having issues with. Which is basically for some reason most of level 10 just because I’m not finding this level very interesting… but fast forward to today I’ve just about got it down now. I think it might be more thanks to the Anki deck though than me putting vocab into Evernote. Evernote is just a list though and not a flashcard system so I have to hide part of my list so I can study… so that is a drawback… one nice thing though about Evernote is that it syncs to my watch so I can review wherever I want to even without my phone. I think Anki worked better for me though so I’m going to try to fumble through it’s horrible non user friendly interface and figure out how to review those dang cards whenever I want instead of having another SRS system that I wasn’t wanting… anyways below is a pic of a note that I made in Evernote that syncs to my watch… cool but doesn’t have the flashcard capability…
-and please excuse my horribly scratched and banged up watch… they are scars from the skyhop tourist bus in Tokyo (railings on the bus scratched it oops) though so I’m not too upset…

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I have issues with Anki is you can easily fool yourself in to going “ah yes, I remember that I’ll just make myself feel good by clicking the good or easy button yes”. With WaniKani it tells you if you’re wrong, but only you can tell yourself if you’re wrong in Anki.

Some decks are good in telling you ‘no this is wrong’ but it’s up to you whether you want to get through the deck efficiently or quickly to get it over with.

Well I can only speak for myself, but I gave up Anki a couple years ago because it got to the point of hundreds of cards to review everyday, spending at least an hour on fruitless reviews, and racking up leeches every session.
With 20/20 hindsight, I’ve been trying the program again with much better results. I’ve totally changed how I use it though.

  • I make my own decks (mostly) and only add words from content I’ve actively been studying.
    I used to try to learn new words with just Anki, but with zero context for the words, it’s very hard to memorize them. Using words only from context I’m familiar with makes them much easier to recall. I have a frame of reference for why the word matters and how it’s used.

  • I study the words written in hiragana first, and then study their kanji after
    I am terrible with memorization. Trying to memorize a new word, its meaning, and its pronunciation is already a tall order. But add on kanji to that? Bruh, it’s not happening. Wanikani gives kanji context with the radicals and mnemonics, so it’s not so bad here. But with Anki, when I see a new kanji on some flash card and I have no prior history with it, memorizing that thing is so difficult. So, I learn new words by their pronunciation (hiragana) and translation first. Then, once I’ve actually learned the words and meaning, I move on to learning which kanji represents those words.

  • I utilize tags and “custom study”
    I blame this on Anki’s unhelpful interface, but after years, I only recently discovered what tags are for. For me, here’s how I use it. I’ll have a deck with a bunch of words tagged “hiragana”, which has the hiragana and translation. Then the same words on other cards are tagged “kanji”, with the kanji on one side, and hiragana and translation on the other. I then have a third copy of these words tagged as “sentences”, which use the kanji versions of the words in sentences. I study the hiragana set of tags first until I get them down, then the kanji, then the sentences. It probably sounds like a super slow process but I simply am that bad at memorizing things. I need this steady build up to comprehend anything.
    Another example of how I use tags is with this deck I have of the most 100 common kanji (one of the few decks I didn’t make myself). All the simple looking kanji, I tagged with “simple”, and the complex ones with “complex”. Then I can study only the simple ones first, and move on to the complex ones later.

  • I limit each session to 20-30 cards
    This may sound like a small amount, but I still end up reviewing between 100-300 cards everyday. Here’s why limiting it to 30 cards is important. If I’m stuck in a 100+ card session, it’s boring, takes forever, and is demoralizing. If it’s split up into several short sessions, it’s much easier to keep coming back to do more throughout the day. And, if you use custom study with the tags, Anki won’t try to stop you from using a deck again if you’ve already used it that day.

The major downside to my method is that making my own decks and customizing the tags takes about as much time as I spend on actual study. But learning a new language is going to take me an ungodly long time anyway, so eh.
Another issue is, I’m more patient with computers and figuring out obtuse codes and interfaces than most people. You need to study Anki help guides to even begin to make use of it. It was mildly annoying for me, and for people with less tech knowledge, I’d imagine it’d be downright infuriating. I had to download an extension to be able to copy cards to even create my tier-level study system. Instead of making every card three times, I just made one list of words, and copied them twice, then modified each list to be a hiragana set, kanji set, and sentence set.

TL;DR I study easy stuff first, then hard stuff. Also use tags. Also short study sessions. Also context for words helps (and so does reading the post in full)

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I appreciate you sharing what works for you!!

I tried Anki…

and now I’m in the process of building a custom deck for Houhou.

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Is it possible to port Houhou 1.2 - Dictionary and SRS application for Windows to web? It seems to be written in C#. GitHub - Doublevil/Houhou-SRS: Japanese dictionary and SRS self-learning application for Windows.

I am using Mac, so I can’t use Houhou

You could try running a windows VM on OSX?
That’s actually what I intend to do at some point shortly.

MacAir RAM 4GB. I don’t want to try VirtualBox yet.

And, I know it doesn’t work with Wine.

Anki seems to appeal most to people who fancy themselves “power users”.

In my personal opinion, it’s the classic example of an app that tries to do too many things at once, and thus fails a little bit at everything. If you want a clear example of how not to design software, the sync feature on the desktop version is a good place to start. Then again, it is free, so…

Also, (again, my opinion) the alternatives just aren’t better. I can’t count how many clever, beautiful, elegant, cutesy flashcard apps I’ve tried and forgotten. Memrise, droplets, duolingo…my app purchase history is a graveyard of well-intentioned but not-quite-on-the-money flashcard apps.

I wonder why such a seemingly simple application is so elusive? Maybe it’s because people have such strong personal preferences when it comes to studying methods?

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Because all this apps are suggesting that they make it easy. Which it is not.
Language learning is freaking hard and will be that way. There is no shortcut to acquiring a language, especially not one from west (English) to east (Japanese).

Anki, being “non-intuitive” for some, forces you to do the work, to think about your routine and
to customize the software till it fits it. Could the interface be better? Maybe. A little bit more fluff and puff and design? Why not. But I like how Anki is not bullshitting you, it is hard, the tool is complex too, because it is a hard task you signed up for, learning this new language.

At least that is what I believe: All this apps you mentioned are based on the slogan how much fun and joy learning with them will be and how easy it is. Which is setting the wrong expectations and causing users to quit, because, oh boy, it is actually work!

That is what I like about WK the most: Is is beautiful designed, customizable via Userscripts, while still being
nice and useful in the default settings (which one can argue Anki is not). On top of that, it never lies to you that it will take a lot of work and time to go through the content.
I fell that Koichi’s eMail about what one can do on every 10 levels and what level on a somewhat fast pace can be achieved after every three months sets the expectations pretty realistic.

@polv
I have no mac and no clues about the OS, but is mono not available for it/is Houhou not working with mono?

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The lack of love for anki bamboozles me…

Has anyone here tried the core 2000 and 6000 decks? They’re awesome. Thousands of sentences full of useful words and reusable patterns all read by native speakers. If you don’t have them or have had trouble finding them just let me know and I’ll pass them on.

As for the grading system, it’s really simple to use. It’s based on how you FEEL about the piece of information.

When the front the card shows up and you have to go “eh, eh, (scratches head) eh, um, arggh I f@#*%ng know this! oh that means X!” and you get it right then you hit the hard/difficult button.
When you get it pretty much right away you hit the green button.
When it’s so easy you almost feel insulted you hit the easy button.

Don’t get bogged down by all the possibilities of trying to customize it, wasting time that could be spent actually studying Japanese. Just get a good listening deck and use it every day for at least half an hour and you’ll be pleased with the results.

Anki is the boss.

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Is it possible to download and use these premade decks without the desktop version of Anki? I only have AnkiDroid and I haven’t been able to figure out how to get premade decks to work…

Yeah I use ankidroid on my smartphone. You have to download them to your phone or tablet and then move the file to ankidroid’s special folder. then on the top left menu button on the anki app select import decks.

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Ok, thanks! I will have to go digging for the ankidroid folder; the file system on this thing (Chromebook) is the most opaque I have ever encountered (annoying as heck!).

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No worries. Let me if you want all of the decks. I’ll upload them to my dropbox and send you the link when I can.

I’ve never met anyone who had a chromebook who never complained about it. Good luck!

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But @sirvine wasn’t necessarily talking about language-learning, right? You can use flashcard apps for all sorts of things.

I also don’t think these things are easy, but that doesn’t mean it should be impossible to design a good flashcard app. If the subject is already difficult, I certainly don’t want to have to grapple with a difficult piece of software as well. You said that you like WK because it is beautiful, easy to use and useful - in which case, surely you can understand that others may not like Anki because it doesn’t provide the former two?

I’m personally of the opinion that Anki obviously works well for some, and not so well for others. I’m sceptical of something that requires me to spend copious amounts of time on the tool itself, when I could be using that time on learning or answering polls.

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Anki is like time traveling back to a Java app from the late 90’s. I tried this CLI version of Anki, but it doesn’t want to install on a mac: https://github.com/marcusbuffett/Clanki

I should probably just write my own CLI version since I’m working in a terminal all day anyway.

With all due respect to the creator of Houhou, I don’t like the Houhou interface either and usually hate porting other people’s code :stuck_out_tongue:

My idea for the webapp is to have a basic setup like WK, for people who don’t want to spend hours setting it up while providing advanced options for people who want to customize everything like they do with Anki.

Importing Anki decks is also a big focus for this project :slight_smile:

That is a valid point. The apps sirvine mentioned were all language learning ones, so I kinda got biased there.
Well, Memrise do has other decks, but like anki most of the time people seem talk about it for language learning (might be my bubble bias though).

I absolutely agree with you! If someone manages to make a general flash card app as beautiful, easy to use and useful as WK is for Kanji, I believe they are in for a good amount of cash.
I was trying to confirm sirvine’s point of the apps he mentioned being not that great because they, unlike WK, while do being occasionally easy to use or beautiful, fail in the useful department because of the wrong expectations they are setting (and maybe because of their broad scope).
Sorry if this got buried!

Oh joy! What wonders do exist!
Terminal is the way to go for a lot of serious work, at least in the CS department. :+1:
Now I wonder if there is an emacs version of anki…

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Ok, I think I misunderstood your point a bit :slight_smile:

I’m not sure I agree that that’s why those other apps fail - I think it’s more of a scope problem, as you say. WK is so great because it’s laser-focused on kanji.

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