Another great thing about Anki is that in its current version it properly displays Furigana:
http://ichi2.net/anki/wiki/JapaneseSupport

There are problems with that though. I color readings I need to train red, and that messes up the furigana. Instead of red furigana, what I want and expect, I get the old style with the kana in paranthesis, colored red. I'm sure it's just an oversight though.

welldone101 Wrote:

rich_f Wrote:Right now I'm sitting on version 0.9.9.7.9 of Anki until the whole converting kanji to kana thing is completely stable and doesn't require any fiddling with setting things to =TRUE or =FALSE to get the exact features I want. (But I'm being fussy about my workflow. More reasonable people can probably work around the changes.)

I think you may have been confused by the bad verbiage of the paragraph that mentioned that. What it said in plain English is:
"Right now furigana will never appear on the question side of the card. Because why would you want furigana on the question side of the card? You should be studying from kanji -> reading or reading -> kanji. However, if for some reason you want furigana to appear on the question side of the card, go swap this code and you can do it"

The kanji to kana thing works fine. It doesn't change any of your old cards unless you tell it to. It just makes new ones better because it seems to be guessing the right readings 99.9% of the time.

No, what I didn't like being changed was the way kana readings were being converted by the newer version. Instead of getting a line with just kana readings, where I could pick the correct readings, he changed to a different program that I didn't think was as good at picking readings, to be honest. (Especially about dates/numbers and such.)

And then there were all of those kanji mucking up my readings line, so if I wanted to copy/paste the reading field and dump it into a spreadsheet, I had to pick out all of the kanji in the field.

It just sounded like more trouble than it was worth, so I'm waiting for it to all get sorted out. It will, eventually, because he said it would. I just don't want to bother with it right now.

That sorted out thing happened this version. Kana that was put after kanji are now put as proper furigana. You can however easily make it into the old version without kanji by just setting TRUE to FALSE in a file. I doubt he has any intention of changing this current system.

AmberUK Wrote:I thought that my vocab problems was to do with use of words. And fine with words like taberu, iru etc you use all the time maybe. But I have words like ant and fly I learned in a word list once and never used but I remember them and that was years ago. The only pattern I see here is I worked with cards for a month with them and only later added to the SRS. But that is a pain to do and now I am trying to do sentences its even more of a pain.

Would Anki allow me to force myself to learn? But allow me to do ones I have failed more etc? I think when I tested software years back there was one called Stacks (?) that did a box system?

Anki has a cram feature that might be able to help you. With the cram feature you can do cards over and over again. When I fail a card too many times, I click on the mark button and then review the marked cards. Go through all those cards once or twice a day for about 3 to 5 days. After that those weak cards become strong cards. You could also do this with new cards too. After you know the card well just unmark it. It's easy and useful.

That sounds useful.

I have been playing with some premade decks. The idea that you can put all the data in and only show what you want and make a variety of cards from it is appealing. Atm in SM I am redoing lots of cards as I know the kanji. I think its easier to work out whats going on from a premade deck than starting your own from scratch. The help pages are a big vague (this is a shame).

I found the other software I tested (years ago) - stackz. They have loads of premade decks too. I am surprised no-one uses that as its quite simple too.

Quote:But I find I learn things best by putting the work in the first month. That means reviews several times a day for the first few days and then decreasing frequency. I have some vocab I have never used but remember years later using this system. ATM I have to use paper cards to do this. But they are a pain to handle and sort out.

When I was trying to rote-memorize the kana writing, people said the SRS wouldn't let me review enough, and advised me to drill often with paper flashcards and then put the questions in the SRS once I knew them. But I did actually manage to make it work in Anki by setting the initial intervals to something very small (3-12 minutes depending on my answer). This made each card appear often at the beginning, and the interval roughly doubled at each review until it reached normal Anki behaviour. Later, I changed the initial intervals on that deck to around 4 hours, which is still much less than the default. So that part is quite flexible at least.

http://forum.koohii.com/showthread.php?p...5#pid52845

The thing with Anki is that one can't say "I used to use Anki 1 year (or even 3 month) ago and I wasn't satisfied so I switch and thus you shouldn't use it" giving how fast it is updated. I myself switched to mnemosyne for a few month when I started the sentences and when I got back to Anki the software was just totally different, and it's becoming better and better.
One of the greatest features of Anki I think is that idea of using models and facts in addition to cards. In mnemosyne I used to put the pronunciation in the translation field and the translation in the pronunciation field in order to have what I wanted but in Anki I just have to modify the card templates. Plus when I made, for example, a spelling mistake on mnemosyne, as I had two cards containing the same information I had to modify them both, while with Anki's fact system I just have to make one modification.

So, really, Anki is best in terms of user-friendlyness and is also much more customizable.

DeadLugosi: I have been fiddling with Anki for probs 5 or 6 updates that I know of and even in that time I have seen a lot of changes. Its certainly worth relooking at if previous updates have not had the features wanted.