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Anki – Powerful, intelligent flash cards

apps.ankiweb.net

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Re: Anki – Powerful, intelligent flash cards

#81

Every few years I use Anki heavily for language stuff (German, more recently Latin and Classical Chinese), up to 90 minutes a day, but I can never keep the workload under control, or my habits change, and give it up. I still benefit from a year of training, but it seems the long-tail of spaced repetition doesn't work for me at all. But so long as I get to the point where I can read or watch TV, the considerable effor…

> Every few years I use Anki heavily for language stuff (German, more recently Latin and Classical Chinese), up to 90 minutes a day, but I can never keep the workload under control, or my habits change, and give it up.

Well... yeah? I guess if you're a full time student or something it's fine but IMO if your review times exceed 5 minutes it's time to stop adding cards for a while.

Re: Anki – Powerful, intelligent flash cards

#82
(Shameless plug at the end)

During my Erasmus in Germany, I've tried almost all of the top language learning apps (Duolingo, Babel, Seedlang, Anki...) and none of them have really worked me.

What I wanted was:

* Learning in context --> A lot of German words do not have direct English/Czech translation, so learning the 1:1 word translation did not work well

* Having audio for each card

* Intensive pace --> Going through a lot of cards in one session. Duolingo is the worst in this as you spend a lot of time doing super easy childish exercises. If I want to learn let's say 30 min a day, I want to pack as much content as I can into it.

* Skipping ahead --> My level is around B1/B2, I don't want to do placement tests and then re-learning the words I already know

* Learning from my content --> I like to consume German podcast/youtube videos/websites and in some apps, it was quite difficult or impossible to add words I've just encountered "in the wild".

Anki has worked the best, but generating cards with sentences and audio was quite cumbersome and (a seemingly minor detail) I was loosing flow while thinking whether I knew the card "well", "good", "easy" or whatever the options are. What I like better is a simple knew/didnt know, while still using spaced-repetition.

So for the past year, I'm on-off working on a language learning app, currently only supports German, which helps you extract words from content (youtube, web, text), handles different word forms, and then generates cards with infinitely many sentence examples through GPT4, with a nice audio (latest GCP model).

The project website with Android and iOS links: https://vokabeln.io/ (web design is old, app looks very different now)

Re: Anki – Powerful, intelligent flash cards

#83
Ankidroid question here:

On Android systems, if you use the free Japanese dictionary Japanese Kanji Study (by Chase Colburn) it can generate Anki flash cards directly from the app, so everytime you look up a word you can also generate the card for Ankidroid/Anki.

Is there similar functionality in any Chinese dictionary app for Android?

Re: Anki – Powerful, intelligent flash cards

#84
post #83

Ankidroid question here: On Android systems, if you use the free Japanese dictionary Japanese Kanji Study (by Chase Colburn) it can generate Anki flash cards directly from the app, so everytime you look up a word you can also generate the card for Ankidroid/Anki. Is there similar functionality in any Chinese dictionary app for Android?

[deleted]

Re: Anki – Powerful, intelligent flash cards

#85

I'm using a competitor on Android since both Anki apps (AnkiMobile and AnkiDroid) really aren't good enough for my language learning activity. They aren't as good as the desktop Anki app. I'm actually thinking of building my own app for a while since the all the flashcard apps on mobile don't really work for me. Not sure I'll find the motivation to do it though, I'm just using the least bad option I've found. Specifi…

Hi, my app which I've mentioned in my previous comment does that. Is there anything else that you're looking for in a flashcards language learning app that Anki misses?

Re: Anki – Powerful, intelligent flash cards

#86

Anki is a great software, but unfortunately it is quite difficult to install on Linux systems. Almost all packages on major distros are by now years out of date or kicked out, because Anki changed its build systems so many times, that the existing package maintainers simply dropped it: https://github.com/ankitects/anki/issues/1378 Nowadays, the Anki version in Ubuntu is from 2019! The snaps are also hopelessly outdat…

It’s also a pain to get working right with fractional scaling on non-GTK desktops.

I had been using GNOME on my little “study pod” ThinkPad X1 Nano (which has a screen that requires 1.5x UI scale) but Anki was a real pain under that and so started using KDE instead. Anki runs well there but KDE isn’t quite my cup of tea. Wish it were more DE-agnostic.

Re: Anki – Powerful, intelligent flash cards

#88
post #82

(Shameless plug at the end) During my Erasmus in Germany, I've tried almost all of the top language learning apps (Duolingo, Babel, Seedlang, Anki...) and none of them have really worked me. What I wanted was: * Learning in context --> A lot of German words do not have direct English/Czech translation, so learning the 1:1 word translation did not work well * Having audio for each card * Intensive pace --> Going throu…

> What I like better is a simple knew/didnt know, while still using spaced-repetition.

Could you just click on the two ends, 1min Vs the scaled max time? I.e. ignore the two middle buttons.

Re: Anki – Powerful, intelligent flash cards

#89
post #82

(Shameless plug at the end) During my Erasmus in Germany, I've tried almost all of the top language learning apps (Duolingo, Babel, Seedlang, Anki...) and none of them have really worked me. What I wanted was: * Learning in context --> A lot of German words do not have direct English/Czech translation, so learning the 1:1 word translation did not work well * Having audio for each card * Intensive pace --> Going throu…

Dude. You rock at UX design. This is amazing…

Only trouble I have tbh is figuring out what I want to read in German! But I’ve signed up and will give this a spin, and send what feedback I can.

Re: Anki – Powerful, intelligent flash cards

#90

Every few years I use Anki heavily for language stuff (German, more recently Latin and Classical Chinese), up to 90 minutes a day, but I can never keep the workload under control, or my habits change, and give it up. I still benefit from a year of training, but it seems the long-tail of spaced repetition doesn't work for me at all. But so long as I get to the point where I can read or watch TV, the considerable effor…

Yeah, I've had the same thing every time I have tried Anki - it's fine for a while, but once you get enough cards added, or just have been memorising a deck for long enough, even missing one session generates a huge unsurmountable backlog. It's bad and consistent enough for me that I just stopped trying to use Anki at all.
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