Home Forums Tips, Hacks, & Ideas For Learning Japanese Anki 2 Guide for the OCDed

This topic contains 13 replies, has 4 voices, and was last updated by  Aikibujin 11 years ago.

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  • #42144

    Aikibujin
    Member

    This is not the thread you are looking for! (*Waves hand all Jedi like*)

    For the Supreme Ultimate Awesome Power of using Anki 2 go here:

    http://www.textfugu.com/bb/topic/guide-to-using-anki-2-with-textfugu/

    Now you’re playing with power!

    #42172

    Aikibujin
    Member

    Was just looking through things and I noticed there is a Sentences 3 deck here:

    http://www.textfugu.com/dl/

    This seems to be skipped in the lessons, so if you want to be complete, you should add this to your TextFugu Sentences deck.

    And of course if this is done, no need to change sentences4 to Sentences 3, as it wasn’t a numbering problem it was simply skipped.

    #42231

    Aikibujin
    Member

    Something I should have realized earlier, but didn’t until now…

    If you read the OP before this was posted amend the numbering to include a 0 before each digit, otherwise Anki will completely destroy your deck order when you hit 10.

    So your deck view should look more like this now:

    -TextFugu Kana
    Hiragana
    Katakana

    -TextFugu Sentences
    Sentences 01
    Sentences 02
    Sentences 03

    -TextFugu Vocab
    Basic Nouns 01
    Basic Nouns 02

    The OP has now been modified to reflect this.

    -Cheers

    PS: If you found this helpful and used it, drop a line here so I know this kind of stuff is actually worth doing up.

    #42234

    Dustin Kelly
    Member

    Thank you so much! I just started and the instructions for Anki were driving me crazy.. This fixed all my issues.

    ありがと

    #42247

    Aikibujin
    Member

    Welcome! ^_^

    #42380

    Aikibujin
    Member

    Update!

    Ok, so if you’ve gone through a few seasons you may have noticed a little alert come up at the bottom of Anki 2, that says: You have a lot of decks. Please see this page.

    Which takes you to:

    http://ankisrs.net/docs/manual.html#using-decks-appropriately

    Basically it says the following (condensed version):

    Decks are designed to divide your content up into broad categories that you wish to study separately You may be tempted to create lots of little decks to keep your content organized, but this is not recommended, for the following reason (the first wasn’t really relevant):

    Anki was not designed to handle many decks, and it will slow down as you add more – especially if you’re studying on a mobile client. A few extra decks is not going to make a noticeable difference, but if you have many decks the delays will start to add up.

    Instead of creating lots of little decks, it’s a better idea to use tags and/or fields to classify your content. Instead of creating a “food verbs” decks for example, you could add those cards to your main language study deck, and tag the cards with “food” and “verb”. Each card can have multiple tags, which means you can do things like search for all verbs, or all food-related vocabulary, or all verbs that are related to food.

    ***

    So basically: lots of decks = bad, few decks with different tags = good.

    Luckily, even though Koichi has set up TextFugu to give us a massive number of separate decks (which is bad for Anki 2), he has tagged each of the separate decks differently, and the tags are actually uniform, unlike the deck names.

    So we already have our tags. Now all we need to do is consolidate the decks into smaller decks.

    BTW: As long as you have a good computer and don’t use Anki on your mobile, you may not need to do this even if you have a massive number of decks.

    Anyhoo, the next post will go into the technical details of how to consolidate your decks.

    #42382

    Aikibujin
    Member

    How to consolidate all your sub-decks into a few large master decks.

    Note: This is slightly technical in nature, so if you aren’t good at using new programs intuitively, you may have problems with this. Feel free to ask any questions about it on this thread. If anyone knows of a simpler way to achieve the following, please let me know. ^_^

    First off you will need to create your master decks that your sub-decks will be consolidated into. How to do this is described in the first post of this thread.

    So once you are finished with that you should have something similar to the following:

    -TextFugu 1 – Vocab

    -TextFugu 2 – Katakana Vocab

    -TextFugu 3 – Sentences

    -TextFugu 4 – Kana

    -TextFugu 5 – Kanji

    (I’ve added a couple new master deck names as I highly recommend separating Katakana words, at least until you are generally familiar with them, as it really bogs down the main vocab deck and can quickly become overwhelming and confusing. Once you are comfortable with them, you might want to consolidate them into the main vocab deck.)

    Once you have your master decks labeled as you want them, click on the “Browse” menu on the main screen of Anki. Should be in bold, just above the decks viewer.

    (Warning: Changing things in this area at random can stop your decks from functioning properly, so unless you know what you are doing, don’t touch anything. I’ve tried to make the following instructions as simple as possible, but don’t play around with things if you aren’t sure you understand them. If you do mess something up, you can always delete your decks and re-import them from scratch, but that’s a lot of work depending on how many seasons you’ve done and you’ll be starting over with the SRS sequencing. So if that makes you nervous, don’t do it.)

    In this “Browse” window you will see a list on the left side. What you need to do now is find one of your sub-decks such as “Basic Nouns 2″ or “Family” and click it (Note: when I say click it, I mean left-click unless I specify right-click).

    This should now cause the cards within that deck to be displayed on the viewer to the right.

    Click the first card, hold it down, and drag the cursor to the last card. This should highlight all the cards in the deck. If you are having problems with this, you can also hold down the Ctrl key and click them each individually.

    Once all the cards in the deck are selected you want to click the “Change Deck” option which is at the top center of the screen (or you can use Ctrl+D).

    The new window will have a list of all of your decks. In this case you are looking for “TextFugu 1 – Vocab” or whatever name you made yours.

    Click the desired deck and then click the “Move Cards” button on the bottom left.

    This will now have moved all the cards from the first deck you selected into the second deck you selected.

    Simply repeat the process with all of the sub-decks that you want in the master deck “TextFugu 1 – Vocab” deck.

    When you are finished moving them, re-click on each of the sub-decks and the viewer on the right should be blank for them. If it isn’t you didn’t move them correctly and will need to try again.

    When they are all blank, move on to the next master deck and move all the sub-decks once again into the master deck.

    For example moving all the “sentences” sub-decks (Sentences 01, Sentences 02, etc) into the master deck “TextFugu 3 – Sentences.”

    Once you have double checked that all the sub-decks are now blank in the viewer, and that the master decks include all the sub-decks, close the “Browser” window.

    You can now delete the sub-decks from the main window by clicking on the drop-menu to the right of each sub-deck and select delete. Be careful not to delete your master decks! @_@

    Once you are done with this, you should be left with just your master decks, which now contain all of the cards from your sub-decks. ^_^

    -Cheers

    #42415

    Aikibujin
    Member

    Please let me know if you use the preceding post to consolidate your decks, as I would like to know if my instructions are clear enough, or if there’s anything that might be confusing.

    #42533

    BF Bullpup
    Member

    Thank you very much for the guide Aikibujin. A pet peeve of mine using Anki 2 (I’ve never used 1 and I started learning Japanese last summer) is that Koichi’s supplemental decks have the deck title showing up on the top of the Anki 2 window. So if I accidentally look up to that title, it will give me a hint for the vocabulary that I am trying to memorize. For example, if I see the word for “lawyer” and I accidentally look up and see “Jobs & Occupations” in the title then it will give me a hint. Consolidating the supplemental decks into the master deck solves that problem. It will make whatever application running those decks run better (so the docs say) and it certainly makes AnkiWeb look more organized when I access my account.

    You may want to edit the OP so that you actually use the term “master deck” in it. So that way it will be more clear what the newly created “TextFugu Vocab” and “TextFugu Sentences” decks are intended to be, and all the other decks should be put under them to make consolidating easier.

    THIS PARAGRAPH EDITED IN: Another suggestion is, for people trying to consolidate decks for the first time, to tell them to FIRST EXPORT their entire collection so if they make a critical error they can simply import the exported collection with scheduling information and media intact. I did that and I also created a dummy master deck and two dummy subdecks each with dummy cards to test out the Move-to-Deck instructions before I actually tried them with my TextFugu Anki decks.

    Do you think it would be worth it to put all the information in this thread into the OP? That’s what I usually see done to guide threads in other forums so I’m not sure if it is easy to do the same thing here in the TextFugu forum.

    Would you (or anyone else) recommend consolidating the Hiragana and Katakana decks into one Kana deck? The cards in that deck were not tagged by Koichi so that would be a manual labor that needs to be done if the consolidation is to be done.

    This thread should be stickied until future TextFugu updates give Anki deck instructions that are written specifically for Anki 2.

    • This reply was modified 11 years, 1 month ago by  BF Bullpup. Reason: I forgot something
    #42549

    Aikibujin
    Member

    You may want to edit the OP so that you actually use the term “master deck” in it. So that way it will be more clear what the newly created “TextFugu Vocab” and “TextFugu Sentences” decks are intended to be, and all the other decks should be put under them to make consolidating easier.

    Done. ^_^

    Another suggestion is, for people trying to consolidate decks for the first time, to tell them to FIRST EXPORT their entire collection so if they make a critical error they can simply import the exported collection with scheduling information and media intact. I did that and I also created a dummy master deck and two dummy subdecks each with dummy cards to test out the Move-to-Deck instructions before I actually tried them with my TextFugu Anki decks.

    It’s kinda silly that I didn’t think to put that in originally. Unfortunately I can’t actually edit that post now, which I didn’t realize would be the case when I made it.

    Do you think it would be worth it to put all the information in this thread into the OP? That’s what I usually see done to guide threads in other forums so I’m not sure if it is easy to do the same thing here in the TextFugu forum.

    Yes it would, but in a couple days when I have a bit more time I am planning on starting a new thread with a more inclusive name and make it more organized, as this thread has grown from what I originally planned (renaming decks), into how to organize Anki 2 decks in general. I want to read the manual a bit more too, in order to see if there’s anything else that should be added. And of course I’ll add the export suggestion. ^_^

    Would you (or anyone else) recommend consolidating the Hiragana and Katakana decks into one Kana deck? The cards in that deck were not tagged by Koichi so that would be a manual labor that needs to be done if the consolidation is to be done.

    Yes, that’s what I did. I simply moved them without worrying about tags, as you only need the tags if you want to only study hiragana or katakana, and I figure if I’m going to do that I’d want to study the whole lot at once anyway, so I’d just reimport them as a separate deck for targeted study. That said, once you hit the Katakana vocab in Season 3, you’ll get more than enough Katakana practice, so I wouldn’t bother.

    This thread should be stickied until future TextFugu updates give Anki deck instructions that are written specifically for Anki 2.

    That would be good once I make the new thread, but unfortunately there’s no one that still hangs around who could do that. I tried to resolve that issue, but was unsuccessful. That’s why I give the link to any new members that post intro threads.

    Thank you for the feedback! It’s hard to tell if my time is being wasted, as in people not actually using or understanding it when no one posts any feedback. @_@

    #42566

    BF Bullpup
    Member

    Cheers Aikibujin!

    #42612

    Hadding
    Member

    Thanks for doing all of this. I’m computer savvy enough to have figured out the multi-deck part on my own, but the tags are a great idea that I wouldn’t have done.

    #42639

    Aikibujin
    Member

    NP! I’ll be updating soon, but I still need to investigate the intricacies of Anki 2 a bit further before I do.

    -Cheers

    #42882

    Aikibujin
    Member

    Rewrite is done! And linked in the OP. Took quite a bit longer than I thought it would, but when you see it, you should understand why. ^_^

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