When I was a beginner Japanese student I used Anki a lot. For a while I hand-made thousands of cards, and also modified and tried to use some pre-made shared decks. But since switching to Wanikani (december 2020) my kanji and vocabulary acquisition speed has skyrocketed, not to mention retention rate, while taking up much less daily time.
By the way, I have always used the Android apps for both (AnkiDroid and Jakeipuu.) I have many reasons for that: I want to be able to SRS in any situation I may find myself with time to waste; I want not to have excuses not to review (picking up my phone takes a fraction of a second, while sitting in front of a PC takes a bit more organization); I actually want the āREVIEWS ARE DUEā notification to bug me all day long, wherever I may be; I want my SRS time to feel more like play than work (I work on computers, so sitting on there causes a mental shift for me); and so on. Whenever I have 30+ reviews due I use a bluetooth keyboard, otherwise the screen keyboard is ok.
Additionally, since WK level 1 I turned on the back to back option in the app Iām using, so that each review consists in 1) reading out loud the kanji or word, if I can; 2) typing in the reading; 3) typing in the meaning. This has worked wonders, compared to Anki (where there was no typing involved*) and so these are features that I now consider essential in any SRS language app.
(*) yes I know Anki has a builtin option for typing in the answer (only one though, while I need two per card) and that you can make cards with complex Javascript, but the entire process is too convoluted and fragile and the end result is way less polished than with a dedicated app. Not to mention I ended up disliking Ankiās algorithm. Maybe you can tune the dozens of parameters to approximate WKās SRS curve, but Iād like to avoid that entire can of worms if I can.
In any case, Iām at a level now where Iām reading material (manga) and looking up words every few sentences. When itās a word with kanji I havenāt seen yet, I just use the dictionary to read that sentence and move on. But when itās an unknown word in kana or with kanji I know, I would like to input it into some kind of SRS to make sure I commit it to memory.
Therefore my question is: What combination of JP-EN dictionary and SRS app would you recommend that would allow me to:
- easily create a card from the dictionary entry (1 click or so, maybe choosing one meaning if it has more than one, but hopefully without manual copy-and-paste, which on mobile is cumbersome);
- have a SRS interface that requires writing the answers, both reading and meaning back-to-back;
- have a good SRS algorithm (unlike Ankiās default, which would inevitably smother me with hundreds of reviews until would I give up on it.)
I have looked into kitsun.io but discarded it because the dictionary-to-card function is too complicated (point 1 above); it does not make me type in the reading and meaning (point 2); the mobile interface looks like a second thought; and I have an issue with its learn / review queue interface (I got stuck between screens and couldnāt figure out how it works.)
Right now, my best bet is using AnkiDroid and the function that some dictionary apps have to export cards to it (such as Aedict3). But before I start using it again, which would entail wasting time trying to tune its parameters and probably give up on being able to type the answers in the cards, I thought Iād ask here for recommendations.
Does anybody have any good recommendation?
