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Anki ownership transferred to AnkiHub

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Re: Anki ownership transferred to AnkiHub

#221

Post by not_your_vase »

jaredklewis wrote: post #34
infotainment wrote: post #5

On the plus side, the actually good mobile Anki client, AnkiDroid, remains out of the hands of this potentially questionable new entity. (AnkiDroid has always been run independently, which is good, considering the state of the iOS client, which has always been neglected.)

I use the official iOS client everyday. What’s wrong with it?

I do too, and I hate it. Some of my pet peeves from the top of my head (there would be more most likely if I'd think a bit, but maybe later):

    > I keep pressing the second button to OK a card, I rarely use the 3rd and 4th. But if I fail a card, that button becomes a NOK, and I keep pressing it out of reflex
    > I can't help interpreting "card was a leech" notification other than "how dumb can you be". Fortunately there is no way to turn it off.
    > It keeps phoning home for some reason, each time it gets into the foreground. It is really great when you are behind a proxy, and it keeps complaining that there is no network, every single time. Of course that call can't be turned off. Also, have no idea what it sends home. I try to trust that it's not some nefarious.
   > Some years ago, for some reason Anki changed DB format, in a backwards incompatible way. There was a notification at the start of the app, that if I don't want it, I shouldn't update my app. I did turn off auto-update. A few weeks later it bricked my deck (my deck got updated to the new format, even though that old iOS app was the only way I accessed it), also trashing my 3 years long strike.

Re: Anki ownership transferred to AnkiHub

#222

Post by KPGv2 »

zelphirkalt wrote: post #138
saubeidl wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, FSRS is much better. For me it was the difference between learning 10 new words of Mandarin a day and learning 20, with the same time commitment.

To me it sounds like an incredible speed to learn even 10 Mandarin words per day, let alone 20. So extreme, that I must wonder, what definition of "Mandarin words" and what definition of "learned" you are using, when you are writing that, or, that you are an extreme outlier in terms of memorizing visual information. For me really learning a word means: (1) Knowing how to say it. (2) Knowing how to write it, meaning t…

> (2) Knowing how to write it, meaning the Chinese characters, of course.

Would you say a native English speaker doesn't know the word "they're" if they keep spelling it "their" even if they use it correctly 100% of the time?

How does this opinion hold up if you consider that spelling wasn't standardized three centuries ago. Did no one know any English words until spelling got standardized in the 1800s? Do illiterate native speakers not truly know any words? Do children not know words?

How would your opinion change if you knew that plenty of native Japanese and Chinese speakers can't write the characters they can read anymore? If you don't have to physically write anymore, you lose the ability to write the characters. This is true of even educated adults in Japan and China. When I was a university student (I'm not Japanese), I could write kanji that my 30+yo Japanese friends had forgotten, but no one would say I knew how to use the words better than they could.

EDIT: And in any case, 10 new vocabulary words per day is extremely easy. In my experience having studied two foreign languages at the university level, that's pretty much the bare minimum expected to get an B in class.

Re: Anki ownership transferred to AnkiHub

#223

Post by KPGv2 »

zelphirkalt wrote: post #206
coldblues wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You've just admitted that the way you use "learn" is different. It's you who is using it differently from the commonly agreed upon way. (3) is arbitrary, ideally you would want to remember the words for your entire lifetime. A lot of people don't care about (2), you'd only care if you want to live in the country and are presented with a lot of paperwork. You learn the words for a day (you're able to match the sounds…

With all due respect, your comment doesn't add much to the discussion. I explicitly mentioned different definitions of learning, and then proceeded to give mine. And with all due respect, someone claiming they learn 20 words per day, in Mandarin, is an almost outrageous claim. If you think that "learning" is commonly agreed upon to mean "memorize for a couple of hours", then please show me the research into the meani…

> with all due respect, someone claiming they learn 20 words per day, in Mandarin, is an almost outrageous claim

Why do you keep harping on Mandarin in particular? Do you think it's harder than other languages to learn new words? It's not like you have to learn new hanzi for every word. Most are compounds. It's like being surprised someone easily learned how to spell "lighthouse" because it's got a silent "gh" and a silent "e" and the "ou" is not pronounced the way you'd expect, and the "th" in the middle isn't pronounced like "th" should be.

The learner already knew how to spell "light" and "house" so it was effortless to learn "lighthouse."

My experience with Japanese is that you hit around 800 or so kanji and new vocab comes very easily. Even new kanji come extremely easily because they're all made up of the same parts ("radicals").

EdIT: One hour a day devoted to language study will yield 20 new vocab words a day that, over time, you'll have around 85% recall, which translates to over 6,000 new words per year (over 7,000 but then you adjust downward because of the 85% factor).

The issue is that people want to learn a language in five minutes a day, but they don't bat an eye at playing a video game an hour a day to be able to beat some level. I remember playing for hours to be able to get good at 1942 on the NES back in the early 90s.

Re: Anki ownership transferred to AnkiHub

#224

Post by KPGv2 »

saubeidl wrote: post #210
zelphirkalt wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To me it sounds like an incredible speed to learn even 10 Mandarin words per day, let alone 20. So extreme, that I must wonder, what definition of "Mandarin words" and what definition of "learned" you are using, when you are writing that, or, that you are an extreme outlier in terms of memorizing visual information. For me really learning a word means: (1) Knowing how to say it. (2) Knowing how to write it, meaning t…

I should have clarified. My goal in learning Mandarin is only conversational fluency, not literacy. I don't bother with the Hanzi past being able to recognize them. I want to be able to talk to people and, if I have to, use a pinyin keyboard to write basic sentences. So only 1 & 4 are really relevant, 2 is what Anki is designed to do.

Literacy shouldn't matter for the definition of knowing a language anyway. Orthography isn't language. It's a symbolic notation that represents a language. Blind people don't speak a different language from non-blind people. Illiterate people can still speak language. Children still speak language. Humans in societies where writing systems do not exist still can speak language.

Writing a language makes you more skilled at living in the modern world. It's not a threshold past which you must travel to count as a speaker of that language.

Re: Anki ownership transferred to AnkiHub

#225

Post by KPGv2 »

zelphirkalt wrote: post #200
david_allison wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The page is on GitHub: https://github.com/ankitects/anki-manual/blob/main/src/sync-... Full disclaimer - it's a feature which AnkiDroid supports, but isn't one which I use.

I see. I am not claiming, that it is your job to fix that. On that page though, the same issues are present. The pip install does not make use of any lock file. pip install anki Isn't a command we should be seeing in 2026. Unless it is a one-off experiment setup. There should be proper lock files, not just version numbers, especially in the Python and JS ecosystems this has become less and less acceptable. SYNC_USER1…

In fairness, Python as an ecosystem doesn't make it clear, either. I used to write a ton of Python back in the v2 days. I came back to Python to write a web crawler in summer 2025 and couldn't believe how it was still a bunch of arcane commands to create a virtual environment and install dependencies and capture the dependencies. Yes, an IDE like Pycharm handles this (thank goodness), but jiminy crickets, why doesn't "pip" refuse to even work until you've done "pip init" which generates a requirements.txt and then every pip install should check for a requirements.txt in the PWD. If it doesn't exist, refuse to install the dep. If the file does exist, append the version of the dep to that file.

It's 2026. Even JavaScript can do this.

pip is the de facto manager for the entire language. It should be better. With Node Package Manager for JS, the installation default is at the project level. You have to do a command line override to install globally.

PIP is the opposite. In fact, the only way to install at the project level is to create a virtual environment and trick PIP into thinking it's installing at the global level!

What language operates like this in 2026? Maven installs at the project level. Unison at the project level. Haskell at the project level. JS/TS at the project level.

Re: Anki ownership transferred to AnkiHub

#226

Post by saubeidl »

KPGv2 wrote: post #224
saubeidl wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I should have clarified. My goal in learning Mandarin is only conversational fluency, not literacy. I don't bother with the Hanzi past being able to recognize them. I want to be able to talk to people and, if I have to, use a pinyin keyboard to write basic sentences. So only 1 & 4 are really relevant, 2 is what Anki is designed to do.

Literacy shouldn't matter for the definition of knowing a language anyway. Orthography isn't language. It's a symbolic notation that represents a language. Blind people don't speak a different language from non-blind people. Illiterate people can still speak language. Children still speak language. Humans in societies where writing systems do not exist still can speak language. Writing a language makes you more skill…

Yeah, that's pretty much my thinking also.

By cutting out the memorization of Hanzi, I am able to accelerate my actual goal of having conversations with people.

In Silicon Valley speak, I think the term would be "ruthless prioritization" .

Re: Anki ownership transferred to AnkiHub

#227

Post by bonsai_spool »

divan wrote: post #175
bonsai_spool wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The web client works just fine!

"Hey, there is an amazing app for learning, but it costs 25$ for your iPhone, so just use web version instead". Very appealing, makes people try app immediately. :)

I think you essentially have to use the desktop version no matter what—so the real dichotomy is whether you want to use a free program with free online hosting with the bundled (free) web application... or if you want to buy a $25 app.

It seems a lot like saying nobody should use GMail unless they agree to pay for premium Google Services.

Re: Anki ownership transferred to AnkiHub

#228

Post by throwforfeds »

jama211 wrote: post #220
throwforfeds wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed, Anki has really helped me with learning new languages. The creation of cards was always a slog though, so recently I've been playing with an Anki MCP server hooked up to Claude. I can dump my iTalki lessons in, or ask Claude to make cards based on a song I've been listening to, etc and get a bunch of relevant cards generated for me. It's honestly been kind of magic.

That’s… genius. This might get me using anki again, I gave up because of the friction of card creation. Thank you for this!

You're welcome! Here's the one I've been using: https://github.com/ankimcp/anki-mcp-server

I've definitely hit walls with Anki over the years, and while the community decks help a lot, it's really nice to just tell Claude "can you take this assignment my tutor gave me, extract all the infinitive verbs, and then make cloze style cards for conjugations at an A1/A2 level?" and get it all done in a couple minutes.

Re: Anki ownership transferred to AnkiHub

#229

Post by ztjio »

DeusExMachina wrote: post #174
jaredklewis wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use the official iOS client everyday. What’s wrong with it?

I also use it every day. It does its job, but it has many usability issues that make it less than ideal. For example, copy and paste retains the text color (probably by design). So, sometimes I get black text on a black background, when the app is in dark mode. The editing process to remove the formatting is pretty annoying. It takes me time to find the edit button, which is buried in the menu but prominent in the de…

Try pasting into an app/textbox that doesn't support any formatting then copy/paste from there.

Re: Anki ownership transferred to AnkiHub

#230

Post by Aachen »

david_allison wrote: post #47
Aachen wrote: post #21

I'm an Anki user, on and off since 10 years or so, but was still confused. If I understood correctly, the entities here are: - Anki, as set up by dae aka Damien, is like the brand name and desktop implementation with the spaced repetition algorithm - AnkiWeb is what I thought this hub thing was. It's where you download decks - AnkiHub is a third party (started by "AnKing", now 35 employees) who sells decks as a month…

> - AnkiDroid is a separate open source project (an Android app). The corporation is hiring the main developer, but it's not yet clear to me whether they're just going to get paid to work more on AnkiDroid or if they're also getting other tasks ---- To copy from my message on Discord: > I’m moving to a full-time position working on Anki [incl. AnkiWeb & AnkiMobile]. I’m really excited about this, but there’s a mounta…

Information on Discord visible only if you sign up for it (and afaik, in some countries, upload identification)... that does seem rather in line with the deep web architecture that AnkiHub uses. Maybe this would be good in a ticket or the Anki forums, since it's relevant to the people using and contributing to the app. Here on HN it's now also findable in web searches as a side effect of copying it I guess
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