r/Anki

I made an app that forces me to study my vocabulary before I can use Instagram, Tiktok, ...

You can also import your own Anki flashcards, Multiple Choice Quizzes or generate Flashcards based on your study notes automatically.

If you want to try it out, you can get it here:

Android:

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.cardgate

iOS: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/cardgate-learn-then-scroll/id6761844846

(iOS not available in EU yet, release is next week here)

If you want free premium, hit me up.

Hey r/Anki!

I've been building a series of German verb decks over the past few weeks. Sharing all three here since they suit different study styles:

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1. 🔁 German B1 Verb Families — Cloze Version (NEW)

Cloze deletion format — best for active recall of word families and collocation patterns. Each card covers the verb, related nouns & adjectives, collocations with the correct case (+ Akkusativ / + Dativ), and example sentences.

📸 Card preview

Download: https://ankiweb.net/shared/info/1637986542

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2. 📋 German B1 Verb Families — Flashcard Version

Same content as deck #1 but in classic front/back format. Front = the verb, back = full word family with grammar, collocations and examples.

> werben (verb) - to advertise/promote > Noun: die Werbung (Feminine, Pl.: die Werbungen) > Collocation: werben für + A > Examples: > 1. Die Firma wirbt für ihr neues Produkt. > 2. Die Werbung ist sehr kreativ.

📸 Card preview

Download: https://ankiweb.net/shared/info/2136327351

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3. 📚 German Verbs A1–B2 — Full Conjugation Deck (131 cards)

My original deck. One card per verb with full conjugation tables, usage examples, collocations, pronunciation and memory tips. Note type: Basic (front/back).

> jemanden nerven - to annoy someone > Conjugation: ich nerve, du nervst, er nervt > Tip: "Nerven" like "nerves" — getting on someone's nerves!

📸 Card preview

Download: https://ankiweb.net/shared/info/1407995493

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Which one fits your setup?

• Prefer cloze deletion? → Deck 1
• Prefer front/back cards? → Deck 2
• Want full conjugation tables? → Deck 3
• Serious B1 exam prep? → All three 🙂

Happy studying! Feedback welcome.

p.s. if you found it useful, a 👍 helps it reach more people!

Hey! I've been working on this for about a month and thought I would show folks. I have gotten to the point in learning japanese where I'm just on the edge of being able to comfortably immerse but I found sentence mining on mobile pretty frustrating and also the question kept coming up as to what words would really help break down barriers in terms of understanding the work.

Which made me wonder, what is understanding a work? What is friction in reading? Frequency analysis is fine and there's tools for that but to me the issue comes after you get past the first few hundred most frequent words and everything all starts appearing 2 or 3 times in a work. What qualitative analysis can you give to words past that point? I already had the books I wanted to read in digital form so... why not process them and figure that out?

SO I tried a few things. Lot of dead ends. Then I ended up on an idea I really liked. What if you chronologically map each occurence of a word to visualize the reading experience. You upload your vocabulary, assign a series of rules to known and unknown words, ignoring particles and auxiliary verbs. Unknown words add acceleration, known words add a bunch of breaking power. Make some adjustments to ensure that it doesn't look super crazy and spikey like diminishing acceleration. Normalize the levels between 0 and 1 and BAM. You get a visual of large peaks in runs of unknown words, frequent smaller bumps in easier sections where you're alternating between known an unknown, and smooth road when it's a stretch of known words. From there you can use something called a peak shaving algorithm that's used by power companies to try and figure out how to lower usage spikes, with learning a word being the way the algorithm can lower that burden. From there you assign a few factors like rewarding a word for being in the top 20k most frequent words, and assigning a high priority to frequency words so you still get that initial important bunch really quickly. And from there it begins to categorize the rest in terms of burden reduction all the way until the graph is fully flattened. It took forever to get right but I am stoked with how the simulations look now. Each step looks like it seriously reduces the visualized friction.

Then I just kind of went from there. I used flow and frequency coverage to assign projects letter grades, and lock in a plan to reach a certain grade and get the word list you needed to get there. I added a multi step time-line so you can see how working towards one work affects the others, and generates a study step between each one with the number of resultant words after the overlap is considered from all previous projects. So instead of learning 1400 words to read SAO progressive I can create a longer timeline of more shit I want to read at various difficulties, and have it sort to steps of 200-400 words between each one.

Then to tie the know I added the anki output. I used ankiconnect to allow for card generation, preview, insertion, and editing. I also tried to make it as foolproof as possible against the common foibles of word sourced flash card generation. The main method is through indexing all sentences in the scanned work that use each given word and then filtering those sentences and ranking them based on how ideal the size is, how complete a sentence the extraction algorithm thinks it is, and its i+n value. With i+1 being the default, and falling back to i+2, i+3 in the worst case. Then it compares the word on the card with the chosen sentence to try and ensure that it is using the proper reading when generating the furigana. (The tokenizer can sometimes be a bit aggressive in kanjifying kana words so it needs to be brought back to the true reading) I searched through a bunch of rabbit holes for how to get audio, to the point where I was about to try and build an audio book extractor before I started to get tired of the project and just decided to go TTS. So I can auto generate TTS for the sentence using api calls to a high end TTS provider.

And bob's your uncle, I can go from scanning ebooks, game scripts, OCRd manga, subtitle files, to making personalized anki decks based on the desired literacy level I want to reach in a given work, and see how that effects all of the other stuff I want to read in the future. Ensuring that the time I spend learning words is used as efficiently as possible, and all of the learned words will be immediately reinforced when I read the project in question.

Other stuff:

-Wanikani aware furigana with the ability to update an entire deck to remove readings when you learn new kanji.

-Game scripts DO work, but given how non linear they tend to be the visualization isn't really going to be accurate. I don't think there's really a way around that.

-Maybe someday I'll add chapter markers from epubs or page markers from manga but for now I'm considering this a completed project.

-Japanese tokenization is horrible and so touchy.

-The point of minimizing the study steps is to only really have one solo study session before the first project and then be able to juggle reading the target book or whatever while you work towards the next one and so on.

-This is probably strictly worse or at best equal in efficacy when compared to pure sentence mining, I just get burned out pretty quickly at my current level.

FINALLY, does it work?

I dunno! I think the theory of flow reduction in applied literacy makes sense but I think the placebo effect of just feeling like I'm learning words with a goal in mind and seeing the changes in the graph before I get to read the thing I'm working towards will be valuable enough. My girlfriend is also pretty intimidated by immersion and thought it would be nice to have a way to figure out if she was ready to read something before trying to tackle it.

Anywho that's my show and tell. Now I need to learn about 3.5 thousand new words and read 12 books I guess.

I have a few different decks I am using, all for Dutch at the moment, in future I think I would want some decks that are not Dutch so got me thinking

1. how do you combine these all under one Dutch heading? Is it too late?

2. are there noticeable benefits or tradeoffs to being able to study all your decks mixed up together? (All same topic though)

So over the past few years I have attempted to learn Chinese and I’ve tried to base it on how I learned Spanish, I’ve been learning Spanish since 2020 and got to b1 over about a year, and currently I’m about c1 I’d say basically I learned a 100 words in Anki then I just went on to watch and read content from there, I’m pretty sure I made my own Anki deck at some point but I didn’t stick with it for long, so I just learned words just by watching stuff from that point forward.

Now I always knew that Spanish was so easy in terms of vocabulary because it’s so similar to English, with about 100 words and all the cognates you can usually parse a test, so I knew that vocabulary would be a lot more important with Chinese, but I had to issues (really 3 because of listening comprehension), I had to learn words in Chinese and also learn how to read them in Hanzi, so my solution was to download core vocab decks to get me started since I could understand and read close to nothing in actual content, I tried a few but the one I used the most was the; Refold 1k Mandarin Simplified which I someone learned 400 words in, the problem is that I really don’t like Anki all that much but when I was learning words with that deck I just could not learn words, looking at my stats 50% of the time I clicked good and 40% of the time I clicked again, I would literally look at the same card over and over and over again maybe about 30 times, sometimes it was the meaning, sometimes it was the reading, but either way just learning 10-20 new cards a day I would spend over an hour on Anki each day reviewing so I just couldn’t stick with it. And it also demotivated me to even learn Chinese

So what was the problem here? The deck? The fact that it was premade? How I was using it? The pics is basically how the deck worded with an example sentence that I usually didn’t know what most of the words were, also there were some words that I didn’t see why they were in the deck under 1k words like basketball for example.