So since Smart.fm is ending and iknow is starting and lot of people will leave it and hopefully move to the next (or better) SRS program. Anki. Browsing the forums some people feel reluctant to move because they don’t know it well so I thought I would do a step by step easy how-to for the most important aspects of using Anki. Mainly so you don’t have to watch all 7 10minute Anki videos and I hope it will come out easy to understand.

Part 1: Using Anki

Download anki here: http://ankisrs.net/
Choose the appropriate operating system to the right and your good to go.
Install Anki
Open Anki (This step is the difficult one, watch out)

Here you will be faced with this:

1: The first circle is the open button. Click this to “enter” or “open” your deck.
2: At the bottom are 3 circles. From the left:
1: “Download”. Click this to open the download window, where you can browse decks to
download decks (e.g the core 2k/6k decks, or Hiesigs RTK)
2: “Create”. Click this let’s you create your own deck and add your own cards (scroll
down for the section on creating decks).
3: “Import”. Use this to import anki decks from a file you DL’d from the internet.

Downloading: This is how to get your core 2k/6k, heisig RTK and more when you first use Anki. Either File > Download > Shared Deck or “Download” (on the opening screen of Anki) to be taken here:

Simply choose your deck, click OK, wait for download, open deck, Enjoy!

Part 2: Creating Decks
This part is important, especially if you are using a method similar to mine or missingno15′s, where you add words or sentences you see in anime/drama/games/J-tv to learn.

Firstly, Click the “Create” button.
You will be faced with this:

Enter in your deck name. Then:

Click “Add Material”. Then:

Yay!

OK. Let me lay it down fo yo.
1) The “Model” bar. This is if you want to change your layout, you can add custom models for say, multiple input sections. This isn’t important unless you specifically want to do fancy things. Ignore it.
2) The formating buttons (Top right). Just your usual, Bold/italics/underline/colour + some others (The last is html editing I believe, in case you want it). the [...] is a cloze (select a word, press it, the word will be moved to the answer side and the front will have a [...] in it’s place). Important only if you know about it and what to use it. Otherwise, ignore.
3) Front. This is what you get shown when a card comes up. e.g　彼女
4) Back. This is the answer side. e.g かのじょ　－　Girl/Girlfriend/Her
5) Tags. This is only for browsing. If you want to tag a card with “special” you can then search for all cards tagged “special” and edit/remove or whatever you want. Usually ignore it.

After you have entered in your info, in this case:

front: 彼女 and
Back: かのじょ　－　Girl/Girlfriend/Her

You can click “add”. This will add your card to the deck, and keep the “add items” window up for more card-creating. Let’s assume I only want 1 card, so I now want to study it. Just click the X and close the “add items” window.

You should have returned to being “in” your deck. Click “review” and you will be faced with the card(s) in the deck:

Look at it, write it down, say it out loud and give the meaning/pronounciation (Or whatever your way is), then click “show answer”.

Depending on how hard or long it took you to remember the answer to the front (if at all) grade yourself by clicking one of the buttons down below. From the left:
Again = You got it wrong
Good = You remembered it, but probably only because you saw it recently
Easy = Didn’t take long, pretty much knew it
Very Easy = Saw it, got it, move on.

Be honest, lying to yourself and clicking “good” when you got it wrong and saying “Ahh yeah I knew that one I just got it mixed up” will hurt no-one but yourself.

After one of the grades it will move to the next card, and the next, and the next, until you either A) run out of cards B)reach your max cards/time per session C) quit. The first two settings can be changed in the deck screen before you click “review”. If you’ve done enough and want to stop go File > Close. This will bring you to the main screen.

This is all the general user needs to know. Open your deck and up the top “settings” will become available which you can use to tweak custom settings. This isn’t important except for one thing, which I’ll explain below.

Part 3: Settings
Fonts, font sizes and colours are the most important settings you want to tweak. So heres how:

Open your Deck
Settings(Up the top) > Deck properties
Click your deck layout (usually basic) and then “edit”
Click What is most likely “forward” and then “card layout” (at the bottom)
Click the “fields” tab
Choose font + font size

Here’s a special treat. This is a font that displays Kanji with a stroke order count. Small numbers next to each stroke indicate the order in which to write it. This is literally amazing. Download here (Click the first link on the page):
Stroke order fonts

Once installed (an easy double click of the main file, you’ll figure it out) follow my font changing instructions above, and set it to the KanjiStrokeOrder with font size 100 (minimum size to be easy to see). Apply it to front and/or back of the cards and your set!

Large link: http://img832.imageshack.us/img832/3241/anki8.jpg

Extra: Syncing. Thanks to Sheepy we have all been shown just how handy this feature is. Losing an entire hard drive nearly meant losing his entire 1800 card RTK deck. But he didn’t, because he synced his deck online and simply re-downloaded it. Simply:

File > Sync > Login (and at this point, create an account)

Select “sync on open.close” to get it to automatically do it, or just sync whenever you want.

This is a rough and I hope easy guide to learning Anki. It isn’t hard, and using it is extremely rewarding.

• This topic was modified 13 years, 6 months ago by  koichi.
• This topic was modified 13 years, 6 months ago by  koichi.