SRS flashcards program: Mochi

[ewoodrp]

Recently discovered this application called Mochi that was designed as a cleaner and more user friendly version of Anki. I’ve been using it for classes this past month and so far it has been amazing! Clean, minimalistic design, easy to use markdown formatting and a really cool feature where you can link different flashcards.

The website is here and it is a freemium app (pay a subscription fee if you want to use the mobile app and cloud syncing) but honestly I’ve been very happy with the free version.

If you’re looking for an SRS flaschard app I can’t recommend Mochi enough!

[Kraits]

I like the card linking idea, it’s very cool.

I’ve added this to the Ultimate Additional Japanese Resources List in the Software section.

[ewoodrp]

Oh great idea! Thanx!

[anon1067447]

It doesn’t say on the site (at least not that I saw), but can it generate furigana and TTS?

[ewoodrp]

Great question! I just tested my app and yes it does!
It was super easy; Just highlight the text and click add furigana from the dropdown menu.
Or you can type it in manually using the markdown shortcuts

振(ふ)り仮(が)名(な)

I hadn’t used this feature before and now I’m even more impressed lol.

[anon1067447]

Nice! How about generating TTS audio? These are the things that make me stick with Anki, but if there is a viable alternative…

[ewoodrp]

Hmmm so I just tried TTS on some of my Flashcards but it seems to be a Pro feature so you would have to pay the subscription fee to access TTS audio I think.
I know you can add audio media to the cards for free, but the in-app TTS does seem to be behind a paywall.

[bhkaronika]

This app looks really promising! I love the UI. Recommendations for JLPT Anki decks that play nice with Mochi? The Tango Omega decks don’t work at all, the JLPT Bootcamp ones create two of every card, and the NihongoShark ones work fairly well but even they’re a little buggy.

[ewoodrp]

Oh that’s too bad that they’re not importing correctly.
Sorry I don’t have any recommendations, I make most of my cards. The only cards I’ve tried importing were my GRE vocab cards but luckily those worked fine.
If you’re up to formatting them a little this is what the Mochi FAQ advises when importing

If you’ve imported a deck from Anki and it doesn’t look right, try opening it in Anki first to confirm that it looks the way it should. Next, edit the template for that deck to remove any unnecessary HTML, CSS and Javascript. A good test is to remove all CSS and Javascript (they will be discarded when impoted to Mochi, anyway) and make sure the cards still look and work as expected. Also make sure to use the special \{\{FrontSide\}\} tag on the back instead of repeating what’s on the front.

[bhkaronika]

Oh whoops, I should have thought to look at the FAQ. Thanks!

[anon1067447]

I tried it briefly on iOS, and did not see an obvious way to generate furigana or TTS, so if that requires a desktop, there is no advantage over Anki. Please correct me if I missed it.

[ewoodrp]

I haven’t tired running it on an iOS device so I can’t say for sure.
To add furigana while using it on my device; I highlight the text while in edit mode, which will bring up a small pop up menu with the option to Add furigana or I can add it using the markdown notation below

振(ふ)り仮(が)名(な)

I’m not sure if this would be different for iOS devices

I believe in-app TTS is only available if you sign up for the premium version.

[anon1067447]

Neither the ios app nor web app on the ipad have those options that I can see. I might give it a try on the laptop eventually, but given that it is subscription-based, I’m not too eager. If Adobe couldn’t keep me…

[bhkaronika]

Hmm, even editing the templates on the Anki decks doesn’t seem to help much. But this seems like a fairly new app, so maybe its importing system will improve over time. I’ll keep an eye out for updates, I’m really into this UI.

Edit to add: to be fair, if it didn’t even occur to me to check the FAQ, maybe editing a template correctly is beyond my capabilities, LOL.

[horseman211]

Hey guys! I’m the founder / maintainer of Mochi. Thanks for sharing @ewoodrp Had to dig out my old Wanikani account for this, hope it’s okay to talk about other apps here.

Just to address some things that came up.

1. The TTS uses google’s wavenet TTS API and it’s impressively good (especially or english, but japanese is pretty good too). Indeed it’s not on mobile yet, but that’s mostly because I haven’t built the mobile UI for it yet, but it should be on there soon.
2. The furigana feature is also desktop only at the moment, just because I haven’t gotten it to work probably with the mobile build, but it is planned to be added there soon too.
3. Anki imports are a bit tricky, but I’ll have a look at those decks that were mentioned and see if I can get the importer to handle them correctly.

Also feel free to email me or reach out on twitter if you have any questions.