Migration To Anki
Posted on | April 25, 2008 | 14 Comments
I have finally migrated my SRS to Anki.
Many language learners seem to be already using this cool flashcard tool. I myself tried it back in January, but I didn’t find the ease of using it. The program requires you to rate your answer before it sets the next time interval for review. JMemorize does not give you many decisions to make. You either get the answer right or wrong. One drawback of Jmemorize is that you have to finish all the lower-level cards first before you can do the higher-level ones. So I would end up getting stuck with hundreds of new words while seeing my familiar words getting expired and cannot do anything about them.
I tried moving to the LingQ flashcard for a few weeks. It is not an SRS, but I found it very convenient when I finished reading an article, I could pull out and flashcard the list of newly saved words right away. But later they added a new feature that would auto-increment the word status after every flashcard session. This was not what I desired, so I had to look for another program.
I decided to give Anki a second chance. After going through the tutorial videos created by the author, I gained more understanding of the tool. I have been using it for more than a week, and I begin to love it.
Here are some nice features of Anki that I like. Its import utility is very agile. I can simply copy-and-paste my vocabulary list right out of LingQ to a text editor and save it as a text file. Anki can parse it with no problem. Another nice thing is that I can suspend any card I like, so I won’t get stuck with a pile of difficult cards at any time.
Then of course there are some features that I hope Anki would have. It is not straight-forward to figure out the current level of a given card. It gives you some statistics but it never displays the level. On the other hand, JMemorize gives a clear layout of all the card levels. Another nice-to-have is a 2-stage display of the question, like what LingQ has done. It shows the word to you at first. If you cannot get it, it will show you the example sentence. In Anki, I find a bit tired of making decision of determining how ‘right’ I get an answer. With the 2-stage question display feature, it gives me another indicator to determine my familiarity with the word. Or better still if it could determine for me. It would be nice if Anki can take more of the decision-making off me.
As of today, I have imported to Anki 1195 out of my 2223 words from my French vocabulary list. One tip of migrating a massive list of vocabulary from one SRS to another is to import the easy and familiar cards first. I extracted my level-4 words from LingQ and import them to Anki. It only took me only 10-20 minutes to get through about 400 of them, and I won’t see them again until a few days later. Then I did my level-3 and level 2 words, which took a bit longer. I then gradually insert the level-1 words. My level-1 contains unfamiliar but infrequent words, so there is no urgency to learn them right away. Here is my current flashcard schedule.
I have also started (or restarted) my Spanish study about 3 weeks ago. I have 618 words so far, and here is my flashcard schedule:
Some people don’t like SRS or another kind of flashcard systems. I used to be one of them. I thought I could ‘absorb’ the new words naturally. But then at one point in time, I experienced the benefits of deliberately learning words, and I could see the immediate improvement I gained. Of course, it could turn into a stressful excerise, but this is why SRS comes in. The beauty of SRS is that you can review your words at your own pace. You don’t have to go through all of them at any time. You won’t lose any word because the system keeps track of them. It is a wonderful tool to build up your long-term memory.
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14 Responses to “Migration To Anki”
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April 25th, 2008 @ 5:26 pm
Hello Edwin,
this is Riad, the creator of jMemorize. I just wanted to point out that jMemorize 1.3 gives you more control over the exact order in which cards appear in learn sessions. You can set a slider between ‘learn all cards ordered by their level’ and ’100% randomess’.
This allows you to completly ignore the card level while learning or learn 70% of the cards by their level with 30% randomly shuffled into that ordered sequence, or to learn in any other combination that suits your style.
By the way, Anki looks nice too. Anyway, have fun.
Cheers
Riad
April 26th, 2008 @ 7:11 am
Hi Riad,
I think randomizing is good, but not as good as being able to suspend particular difficult or seemingly useless words, and resume them later on.
I hope you will consider implementing the 2-stage questioning feature in your future release.
Again, I want to congratulate you and thank you for developing this wonderful tool.
April 27th, 2008 @ 7:15 am
Hi Edwin,
Glad to see you’re enjoying Anki. I too seemed to catch on to the new Anki craze a little later than some other bloggers, but now it has become pivotal to my language study. I like the way I can put in new vocabulary when I have the time (eg weekends) then use it very easily and quickly to make use of spare five or ten minute breaks in the week, when I wouldn’t have time to sit down with cards or books.
Can relate on the not wanting to have to choose between the buttons all the time, but I’m not sure how it would figure out how well you remembered something unless you told it. I guess there’s only so much work we can take out of language study!
April 28th, 2008 @ 9:19 am
The ‘completely forgot’ and ‘made a mistake’ options are straight forward. The other 3 options are harder to choose.
If the 2-stage questioning feature is implemented, we can label a word as ‘easy’ if we don’t need to see the sample sentence, and ‘about right’ if we do need to see it.
April 28th, 2008 @ 10:12 am
I love SRS and Anki in particular. As I have a flat fee mobile internet plan I use it while commuting, which just rocks. As for the grading system; you’ll get used to it after a while. At first I hated it, now I love it.
Great thing that you picked up Spanish. Please share your progress on this blog.
April 28th, 2008 @ 10:20 am
Yes, Ramses. For sure I will talk about my Spanish progress, especially my ‘RR’ progress.
One thing I found out immediately was that there are tons of Spanish learning bloggers out there, compared to almost none for French. This is quite encouraging.
May 23rd, 2008 @ 8:16 pm
Hi, Edwin,
I’ve been searching high and low and have had a hard time finding Anki study decks for French and Spanish vocabulary and verbs. I can piece them together myself but that is very time consuming.
Would you be willing to post your decks or alternately an importable text file or Excel spreadsheet?
Best regards,
Philip
May 25th, 2008 @ 3:48 pm
Hi Philip,
I can give away my decks, but I am not sure if it is beneficial to you to study them out of context. It is just like studying the dictionaries. I have mine for last year posted up in my ‘projects’ session. Take a like and let me know if you still want them.
June 19th, 2008 @ 1:34 pm
[...] basketball. The author of Tower of Confusion definitely fits the bill. Check out recent posts on Migration to Anki and Shadowing Alone. Good [...]
July 28th, 2008 @ 3:54 am
What are you talking about?
You don’t have to do all of the lower level cards first in Jmemorize.
You can do any category that you choose withing a given Jmemorize file. For instance, I’m studying French. I organize my flash cards by chapters and sub-chapter sections. So, I can drill whichever chapter or section thereof that I want.
July 28th, 2008 @ 4:02 am
Additionally…
Anki, while it looks quite nice, only seems to have the option of having one big deck for a given set of flash cards. I don’t care for that at all. I have well over 3000 French flash cards. If I couldn’t organize them by chapters (or whatever) within a single set of cards, it would drive me nuts.
July 28th, 2008 @ 6:29 am
Hi Hooper,
I have never thought of categorizing them into chapters. Perhaps this is a good idea. But what if a common word appears in more than on chapters? In this case, you need to use tags. Anki supports tags.
Thanks.
November 7th, 2008 @ 6:30 pm
Sorry to bother you Edwin, I’m a new Anki user and looking for a French deck to start using (native English speaker wanting to learn French). In this post I saw you mentioned building your own French deck. Is there any chance you could email me a copy? I know there is benefit in building my own one (and I intend to do that eventually) but it would be great to have a starting point rather than a blank screen. Thanks in advance Gary (P.S if for any reason you can’t help out – no problem – enjoyed stopping by anyway)
November 9th, 2008 @ 4:56 pm
Gary,
Sure I can send you my deck. But then I am thinking perhaps I should post it up somewhere in my blog in case others ask for it too. Give me a few days.
But then honestly, I don’t think learning from other people’s decks is as efficient as building up your own. I will have a post to talk about this. Stay tuned.