Kurosawa Wrote:I really wouldn't call that a minor convenience it's more like a major time saver and 50MB is nothing for that.

really? i mean, seriously, it just took me less than a 1/4 second to look down and verify that anki auto-filled the exact same phonetic sounds i entered into the IME to input the kanji compound. even multiplied by entering 100 compounds in one sitting wouldn't be what i would consider major.

now, if i had to actually correct the auto-filled data for lots of the compounds, that would get annoying. i haven't yet been using anki long enough to judge this, but is anki's current auto-filling that innacurate?

i guess what i meant when i asked if i was missing something important is exactly that. is the current program very innacurate during bulk usage? is there some further functionality that the change of dictionaries would bring with them? are many people entering kanji without an IME? etc.

of course 50mb isn't big compared to software and storage options these days, but like i said, it is significant in that it represents more than a 200% increase over the current size of the application itself.

decamer0n Wrote:now, if i had to actually correct the auto-filled data for lots of the compounds, that would get annoying. i haven't yet been using anki long enough to judge this, but is anki's current auto-filling that innacurate?

Yes!

decamer0n Wrote:i guess what i meant when i asked if i was missing something important is exactly that. is the current program very innacurate during bulk usage? is there some further functionality that the change of dictionaries would bring with them? are many people entering kanji without an IME? etc.

I usually use a lot of example sentences, because I noticed that they help a lot in learning new structures and if you get like three possibilities for every fourth word it gets quickly annoying to hand-edit that all the time.

decamer0n Wrote:of course 50mb isn't big compared to software and storage options these days, but like i said, it is significant in that it represents more than a 200% increase over the current size of the application itself.

C'mon, do you really care if the most helpful learning tool which you are using every day takes 50MB more on your 200GB hard disk?

Kurosawa Wrote:

decamer0n Wrote:i guess what i meant when i asked if i was missing something important is exactly that. is the current program very innacurate during bulk usage? is there some further functionality that the change of dictionaries would bring with them? are many people entering kanji without an IME? etc.

I usually use a lot of example sentences, because I noticed that they help a lot in learning new structures and if you get like three possibilities for every fourth word it gets quickly annoying to hand-edit that all the time.

yeah, i would vote for better furigana over smaller program. i sometimes use http://www.hiragana.jp/ for getting example sentences from yahoo JP dict. and if i could skip the step of hirigana.jp and just trust anki pretty well (i mean, i still read the hirigana and make sure it doesnt have any obvious errors, but usually it seems right)

thats my 2cents

Kurosawa Wrote:I usually use a lot of example sentences, because I noticed that they help a lot in learning new structures and if you get like three possibilities for every fourth word it gets quickly annoying to hand-edit that all the time.

ok, that's exactly why i asked my question, rather than just assuming people were being absurdly frugal with their time. that makes a lot of sense then. and certainly justifies a big change in the application.

actually, i don't have 200gb. i only have 4gb on my hard drive, in total. please try to have a little pity on me. haha. but actually, that isn't at all why i said something about the extra 50mb. as i said in my original post, i'm just a big fan of super-svelt, portable applications. i think they are sexy.

decamer0n Wrote:actually, i don't have 200gb. i only have 4gb on my hard drive, in total. please try to have a little pity on me. haha. but actually, that isn't at all why i said something about the extra 50mb. as i said in my original post, i'm just a big fan of super-svelt, portable applications. i think they are sexy.

so, this might be a bad suggestion, but couldnt the better furigana thing be optional? like a plug in? not only would this solve this problem, but it would also make more sense for people who use anki to study things that arent japanese.. A) in the future you could add more pronunciation dictionaries for things like chinese if you want, and B) who wants a 50mb japanese dictionary if you are using anki to memorize capitols or something.

resolve? what do you think.. would it be a ton more work to make the pronunciation part more modular? if not, i think thats the way to go..

i definitely wouldn't expect the application development to need to cater to the few people like me who still have 4gb hard drives. so don't take me the wrong way...


however, taking the issue in a different direction:

skylarth Wrote:resolve? what do you think.. would it be a ton more work to make the pronunciation part more modular? if not, i think thats the way to go..

skylarth really struck at an excellent point about some users not needing japanese dictionaries, or maybe desiring chinese dictionaries instead, or whatever.

it might end up being more trouble than it's worth,
but modularity is pretty damn sexy.

Hehe I found what resolve said earlier in the thread:

resolve Wrote:Because it would be reinventing the wheel (there are more advanced tools out there already). Eventually I will move to the "IPADIC" dictionaries and a more sophisticated morphological analyzer like 'mecab' or 'chasen'. The dictionaries are 50MB uncompressed though - so the current solution is a tradeoff between accuracy and size. If I move to a better dictionary, I'll have to start distributing them separately.

So keeping the dictionary seperate was his plan anyway

Kurosawa Wrote:So keeping the dictionary seperate was his plan anyway

sweet. because i think that the pronunciation is what really makes anki stand out in my mind within the SRSs out there, so it seems that this could carry over to other fields, like pronunciation dictionaries for languages where reading is easy but that doesnt mean you can say what you just read out loud. (english anyone?.. for people studying engish with anki you could have it put in phonetic symbols or something)

johnzep: I chased up the merging. You are right, the JLPT2 deck contains some vocab from 3 and 4 as well (but not all of it).

Anki 0.3.6 is out.

* Export support
* Tagging input on importing
* Scroll to the end of the card when displaying answer
* Remember import/save/load/export/picture/audio location
* Sort tags in card editor and completion dialogs
* Save to a tmp file then rename (fixes EOF errors if save is interrupted)
* Delete utility windows on close
* Move, don't copy backup files (faster)
* Various media-dir fixes
* Fix mnemosyne importing
* Autosave on add support
* Change kanjistats toolbar button to card stats
* Don't use custom colours in editing, only quizzing
* Don't force the user to name a file when creating it
* Don't ask if the add cards window should be closed twice
* Check if a file exists after appending an extension
* Open default file with .anki not .fc
* Fix font properties bug
* Various other bug fixes

http://repose.cx/anki/download/index.html

hurray for .deb packages!

Ok, so I've just finished putting in some sentences and I have to say that having to delete all the multiple meanings for the kanji is really starting to bore me. Especially as the one I want nearly always appears first in the list. I'm guessing this is because if you're using the kanji in a compound, then the whole compound is used to determine reading.
Anyways, while doing one of my many 'select - delete' motions, I thought it would be much easier if only the first reading of a kanji's list showed up, but with a highlighted background. Then, as you read through to check the readings, if one is wrong, you click on the reading and a list pops up with the alternatives from which you can select. Exactly like the IME I guess *blush*. I have no ideas about programming so perhaps that's a real pain to do... Just throwing it out there though...

is there a painless way to have all my input for "expressions" switched to "meanings" and vise versa? somewhere along the way it got switched, either thru import from 0.2.8 or thru my own clumsiness. in any case, i just noticed it now and wanted to fix it. thanks.

It guessed based on your "target language". If the target language was Japanese, the expression should have been Japanese too.

What is the structure of your deck now? If Anki made a wrong guess, send me your deck and I'll fix it manually for you.

thanks for the help. i just mailed it to you with the details. thanks again

Looks like the server's down. Can't sync or connect to anki.repose.cx or the bug tracker.

Router died. I've rebooted it now

Before I do anything, what would happen in the following situation? I've added cards to my deck using the desktop version and didn't sync with the server afterwards. If I add cards using the online facility now, will there be problems when I go home and sync? i.e. more generally, what does the syncing algorithm do if both the server copy and the local copy have been changed?

Should be ok, as long as the ones you add on the web are different from the ones you added in the desktop version.

If you reviewed on the local version without syncing and then try to review on the web there's the potential for problems but as long as you only add cards, you'll be ok.

You can make changes on both sides and sync, and everything should work. The deck-wide statistics (number of cards answered correctly), deck models and so on will be based on whatever deck was modified latest (it won't add the statistics together), but each card and fact has its own modification time and changes will be synced in whatever direction was modified last. Added and deleted cards will be handled properly too, so you can add/edit/test and delete cards on both sides an expect it to work. Note if you review the same card on both sides, the more recent review will take precedence.

resolve Wrote:each card and fact has its own modification time and changes will be synced in whatever direction was modified last.

Good info to know. I was wondering about that myself.
勉強になりました。

resolve, i think i have a bug to report. today i added about 70 new cards to my anki deck and i dont think the chart for new cards is working anymore.. like it shows when i added stuff in the past, but not today's. (its been a few days since have added new sentences, so i cant say if this is before or after i did the last upgrade... ) anyways its anki on os x.

does anyone else have the same bug?

its not really important... but there it is.

just like to say resolve im really liking what your doing here. It looks very professional and its a lot better than any of the other packages ive used.

For future suggestions well they are pretty out there and not so much of a priority but if you ever run out of things to do how about integrating your own eping viewer into anki....perhaps there is opensource code available already. Why? Well im just damn lazy and i hate having 3 or 4 windows open - EBWin for my dictionaries, sanseido website for J-J definitions, anki for srs etc. Having to alt tab - highlight the sentance then copy the n alt tab and then paste gets on my nerves. A right click "Paste to flashcard" from a dictionary within anki would be sooooooo nice...I guess if it ever got that high tech you could even incorporate a browser s you can read japanese websites within anki and then when you find a sentanace you want to grab you ust right click and say send to new flash card.

Also i find that when im finding sentance ala Japanese all the time i often end up having to find definitions to words that are in my original sentance - he calls it "recursive searching" i prefer to call it a "Pain-In-The-Ass". I end up just dumping loads of sentances in windows notepad and cross them off as i get them in...maybe this coud be incorporated in the form of some "to do" list. Again not high priority and maybe not even useful ;-)

Having rikai chan style mouse cursor would be great too!

as i said low priority stuff.

how do you find the time to do all these updates by the way? do you have time to study? do you work? hell do you sleep?

skylarth: are you still having problems? it seems fine here.

thegeezer3: thanks for the feedback. epwing viewer integration is a little outside the scope of anki - a tool like stardict would be a better solution. also note the plugin 'epwing.py' in the plugin section of the wiki, which lets you send words to an external dictionary. i use that to look things up when i need to.

note that rikaichan (the 'hover to get definition' tool for firefox) also has an option to save things to a file. that way whenever you hover over a new interesting word, you press a key and the word and definition is appended to the file of your choice. you can then process the file later and add everything to anki. at one point in the future i might hack on the sourcecode to make it include the url and full sentence for context too.

as for recursive searching, again this is a defect of your dictionary software, and not really something that belongs in anki. the epwing viewer i use has forward and back controls so i can return to previous searches after i've finished looking up another word.

as for finding time for updates, my studying has suffered somewhat in the last few months as i've been so busy with anki. things are pretty stable now and so i've been trying to strike a balance between programming and my own study again. i do have a full time job and do need to sleep too, like everyone else :-)

Hello everyone,

I've just started using Anki after finishing RtK and I have a question. I apologize if it's dumb or if it has been answered before.
I've read that Anki can automatically fill in the "reading" field, but I can't find how it works. If I type a sentence with kanji in the "expression" field I don't get the reading in the reading field.
I'm using Anki 0.3.6 on a powerbook G4 with Mac OS 10.4.9.

Thanks in advance, I look forward to using this.