Help needed with Anki

stevenhowe · August 6, 2019, 3:29pm

Hi everyone,

I am trying to use anki to reinforce my vocabulary, but I am lost and getting more frustrated every time I open the damn thing.

I figured the WK 10k deck would be most useful, since, after doing some research, I came across this post by @polv:

This part caught my eye “You can manipulate this deck to show the sentences / listen to the sentences / quiz the sentences, too.”

But honestly, I have no idea how to do this. I feel like the only person on the planet who cannot use Anki - I have looked for tutorials, including those by @hinekidori, but everything I see seems to assume some knowledge of Anki that I don’t posses. I feel like I am wasting Japanese study time trying to figure out how to use this tool.

Can anyone tell me how to split this deck up into its constituent parts, or post me to a really good tutorial on Youtube or something?

PS - I have landed on Anki for its ubiquity (tho clearly not its ease of use), I am not interested in other SRS tools at this point (WK aside obvs.)

Ncastaneda · August 6, 2019, 4:20pm

Maybe you could provide some pics (of the Browser window with the deck selected). The file is rather large you know.

I assume there’s a column with the WK levels, which can usually be used to order the cards in the deck (you click in the column’s name). Then you can select all cards (ctrl + A) and in the “Cards” option you can choose “reschedule” and I will put the due date following the way you have them oredered in the Browser, which if you ordered by WK level should be enough to go from Lvl 1 until 60.

A real simple way to review cards according to the level you wish (in case you want to focus in a specific level) would be to just select all cards → right click and suspend them. And then just select the right level and unsuspend those.

In any case, yeah, Anki doesn’t have a cutsie GI to starts, but it ain’t rocket science either . After you learn the basic functions the rest usually is just for making things pretier.

irrelephant · August 6, 2019, 4:37pm

So you want multiple types of questions for one card.
That means for your existing note type you want to create additional card types. A note is the item that contains information such as “Word in Japanese”, “Word in English”, “Sentecene in Japanese”, “Audio”, etc.
For one note, you can have multiple cards. On card could be formatted to show you e.g. “Word in Japanese” on the front and “Word in English” on the back. Another one could be formatted to have Audio on the front and so on.

You are using Anki on the desktop, correct? And you downloaded Hinekidoris Core deck and imported it into Anki and now you are trying to figure out how to customize the template?

I agree that screenshots would be best. But to give you an idea what it is you are trying to do:

1.) Deck overview. We are going to look at “Core Listening”:

2.) Go to browse, find deck in the sidebar or via some other way to see all the cards:

3.) Click on “Cards” to see the cards that have been configured for this note type:

4.) Customizing the template
In “Front Template” you will for example see the content that you will see on the front of the deck. My audio file that I want to hear on the front is in a field that is called “Sentence Audio”, that is why my template says {{Sentence Audio}}


<div class=encl style='margin-bottom:500px'>
	<p class="sent clozed"> {{Vocab Kana}} </p>
<hr/>

	<p class="sent">{{kanji:Sentence Furigana (Main)}}</p>
</div>

{{Sentence Audio}}

5.) Adding more card types
If you wanted to have different card types then you could click on the “+” on the top right and create an additional card type. You could copy the front and back template from the existing card type over to your new card type and then slowly start changing it.

When I started using Anki, I found this tutorial helpful:
https://www.roessland.com/blog/customizing-anki-decks-core-2k-6k-10k-further-optimized/amp/

I do however have a technical background so the knowledge gap I had to close might be a little bit smaller than for others. I can completely relate to feeling a bit overwhelmed at the beginning. But Anki is such a great tool once you get the hang of it. We will make this work

stevenhowe · August 6, 2019, 8:38pm

I am using the desktop app. I am trying to make a deck for vocab I have learned so far in WK, but take advantage of being able to make a deck with sentences etc. I don’t know exactly what I want because I don’t have the skill to interrogate what I have.

stevenhowe · August 6, 2019, 8:44pm

Yes

I honestly don’t know what I’m doing.

I downloaded the file and, curious about its contents, double-clicked it to open in the Anki app - first rookie mistake; about 20 minutes later Anki has decided it has finished syncing.

I think I want to be able to work through the vocab that I have learned so far in WK (currently on lvl21) but not just the words - I like the idea of sentences and the audio contained therein (I’m hoping to improve my listening and speaking by repeating the audio).

I just don’t know how to dig into what’s there and pull out what I think is going to be useful. I don’t really want to just repeat everything I have done in WK so far as that would be a bit tedious.

Thanks for supplying some screenshots and the link to the tutorial. I will check that out tomorrow morning and hopefully will have made some progress!

RoseWagsBlue · August 6, 2019, 9:55pm

Anki has trouble with big collections. There are even worse decks than the one you have downloaded. I will try to post some tips when I get a chance.

Kumirei · August 6, 2019, 10:09pm

Can you elaborate? I never had any issues

RoseWagsBlue · August 6, 2019, 11:11pm

I have downloaded big decks that took multiple tries, or took an hour to open the first time. I will try to duplicate the situation some time, and describe it better. I recall that you see a spinning busy signal with no indication tha tanything is happening, for many minutes.
Also, if you choose to sync your deck with the mother ship, it can take several minutes (even 5 or 10) each time you open and close Anki, even with a good internet connection.
I have always guessed that they have database issues.
I have not tried downloading big decks in a long time, because I just crate my own as I go. But sometimes I get tempted again.

Rowena · August 7, 2019, 1:14am

You are not - I gave up because I just didn’t have the time to figure it out, and irrelephant’s answer helps confirm how complicated I though it was. Best of luck to you, though, I hope you understand that explanation better than me!

irrelephant · August 7, 2019, 5:08am

@RoseWagsBlue Anki in general does not have troubles with big decks. It might have problems with really HUGE decks and lots of subdecks but just the core deck and a couple of other decks that are even larger are no problem at all. This might depend on the client though: on my ipad and a slow Android device I also had problems like that. On my desktop, everything works fine. 20 minutes for syncing is also not normal in general - that should be caused by a slow device or network connection.

OK so @stevenhowe you basically have two questions:

How do I set up my own card types with eg sentences on the front? Ideally, my screenshots and the link would answer that already. If they don’t then you would have to provide screenshots of what your Anki looks like and at which step you are stuck
How do I filter my deck to study only certain cards? For that, a screenshot of the content of oke card would help too. Then we could see if these cards have eg tags or fields (I guess so) that will help you filter items by WK level. What you will basically be doing is suspend all cards in the core deck and then use some kind of search to find all the cards you want and unsuspend them so that Anki will show you only those cards

stevenhowe · September 25, 2019, 9:49am

Update on this in case anyone is interested or stumbles across it in the future…

I have given up on Anki as life is too short to get as frustrated as I was getting with any form of technology.

All is not lost though as I have discovered Torii SRS, which I know some of you have recommended to me previously. I originally dismissed it as there are a lot of SRS platforms available and they always seem to fall short of what I needed. However I was foolish to dismiss Torii because it is exactly what I was looking for.

I don’t like relying on me having my laptop with me to study, so, discovering that Torii only has a mobile Android app (i have an iPhone), I went and bought an android tablet.

Yes, an app so good it actually made me buy new hardware so I could use it.

@Rakantor you’re a genius and once I’ve paid off this tablet, I’ll pay the subs on Torii too. Thanks.