Seeing that there's a favorite anki deck thread or some sort, it makes sense with all the plug-ins available that people post which ones they find essential, useful or just convenient. This might help people realize there's a useful plug-in that they didn't know about.

Heck, talk about what changes you make to help your learning efforts even further.

Note: any suggestions for updates or new types of plug-ins are best posted in the anki feedback forum, though talking about it here is cool.

**Edit**

Here's the results thus far for existing plug-ins (actual plug-in name is used to help search for it in Anki):

Japanese Support - needed for things like furigana, kanji stats, dictionary lookup, etc.
Regenerate Reading Field- create furigana for bulk or single cards
Kanji_info - Puts all kanji in a card on bottom of answer, mouse over to give meaning.
Audio Download - gets JDIC audio
Search Fields - search specific fields in Anki
Tatoeba Japanese Example Sentences - Display sentences from tatoeba sentence project
Custom Media Dictionary - allows alternate locations for media deck (useful for dropbox).
Kanji + JLPT Stats - replaces kanji stats, adds useful features (My video on adapting it)
Learn mode - New cards (or tagged "learn") use pimsleur sequence (5 sec, 25 sec, 2 min, 10 min, etc.)

Results of "Wishes it existed"

Card Mature? - Notifies you when a card matures

This plugin that Blahah hasn't written yet, which notifies you when cards are mature: http://forum.koohii.com/showthread.php?tid=5412

In all seriousness, I'll come back w/ a list soon.

To start off, Third's plugin/extension for JDIC sound.

For some reason I couldn't get the "Japanese Support" plugin to work. Oh well, it seemed cool.

The Regenerate Reading plugin is essential. When editing a card you can regenerate the reading field with ctrl+g and do it in batches in the card browser. Really handy when you import a bunch of stuff.

zachandhobbes Wrote:For some reason I couldn't get the "Japanese Support" plugin to work. Oh well, it seemed cool.

You should really follow that up and *make* it start working. Japanese support will be the single most useful plugin you ever download for Anki.

I'm not exactly sure why it doesn't work. I think it has to do with the fact that I copy paste the Kanji from RtK into my anki or something, but for some reason none of the plugins seem to recognize my Kanji characters (Japanese Support, example sentences, nothing works). I just don't know why.

@zachandhobbes -- What exactly isn't working? You say that it doesn't recognize the kanji characters, but where doesn't it recognize it? What is it supposed to do, and what happens instead?

It works most of the time for me, but the xxfurigana plugin (which I also recommend!!) sometimes doesn't like to do its job in certain card models :/

I dunno what to say. I install the plugin, restart my Anki, and when I flip the card no extra info shows up.

It could be that I made my own deck and added my own cards as I progressed rather than using the downloaded Heisig deck from the shared decks but that's how I prefer it.

Well, as far as I can tell there shouldn't really be any extra info...
According to the page on the Shared Plugin thing, it only adds:
1. Japanese model
Sure it's just a card model, but it's nice to have as default.

2. Automatic reading generation based on mecab and kakasi
WOO! Especially when hooked up with #3

3. Furigana display
WOO! Use it on pretty much all my cards

4. Dictionary lookup
Not quite sure where this is, never used it

5. Kanji statistics
Tools > Kanji Stats. Some people might like it. I don't use it.

So yeah, it really doesn't do anything to your cards. It might be working fine, but you just don't know it. Easiest way to check would be to see if you have "Kanji Stats" in your "Tools" menu.

Oh cool.

I guess I just didn't know what the features were. I use Kanji Stats all the time to check my various progress.

I don't understand feature 1, 2, and 3 though. Is that for when you're SRSing sentences?

what is 'automatic reading generation'?

I'm not 100% on how it works, but from what my experience tells me is that:

The Japanese card model is just a card model with "Expression" "Reading" and "Meaning" and other stuff you can put in. (Actually, now that I make a new deck, it's now showing up...)
But, to get 2 and 3 to work, you need a card model named "Japanese" with at least an "Expression" and "Reading" field.

With the Furigana Display, it will take whatever is in the "Reading" field, and display it with furigana. Formatted like:
君[きみ]がくれた 勇気[ゆうき]は 億[おく] 千[せん] 万[まん]
And whatever is in the [] gets turned into furigana instead of being displayed like that.

This is kind of annoying to always type manually. That's why you type the original, non-furigana-ized version into the "Expression" field, and if the "Reading" field is blank, it will automatically format it and put it into the "Reading" field for you.
So you type, in 君がくれた勇気は億千万, and automatically comes out 君[きみ]がくれた 勇気[ゆうき]は 億[おく] 千[せん] 万[まん] in the Reading field.

Then you get the xxfurigana plugin, and you can display furigana in any field, and not just the "Reading" field.

nest0r Wrote:This plugin that Blahah hasn't written yet, which notifies you when cards are mature: http://forum.koohii.com/showthread.php?tid=5412

In all seriousness, I'll come back w/ a list soon.

To start off, Third's plugin/extension for JDIC sound.

Whooops. Been busy moving house and starting a new job. It's on the pile of things to do

Blahah Wrote:

nest0r Wrote:This plugin that Blahah hasn't written yet, which notifies you when cards are mature: http://forum.koohii.com/showthread.php?tid=5412

In all seriousness, I'll come back w/ a list soon.

To start off, Third's plugin/extension for JDIC sound.

Whooops. Been busy moving house and starting a new job. It's on the pile of things to do

Pish posh. Oh well, guess I'll have to properly tag w/ batch/show information and then periodically sort by intervals or something. I hate you.

nest0r Wrote:I hate you.

I can live with that. Wait... maybe not. No, definitely not. WHY DON'T YOU LIKE ME??

Remembered another one I like, Kanji_info

takes all the kanji in a card and displays them at the bottom of the answer side with the stroke order font. Mousing over the kanji gives its meaning too

Didn't want the thread to die. I think it'll be helpful for people new to Anki and even those not aware of new plug-ins.

PS: I modify Kanji Stats' .py file in the following

In RTK deck, I look at what Kanji that I've studied is not in the Kanji Stat's list. I add a "non-JLPT RTK" section to Kanji stats with those extra kanji.

With the above, now I can look at kanji stats of my "sentence method" or "vocabulary" decks to find all the kanji I've not yet studied and un-suspend or add them to my RTK deck. I then re-update the Kanji-stat .py file.

I'm surprised no-one has mentioned the download audio plug-in. It is so very, very useful. Hopefully most people know about it.

I also find 'search fields' indispensable
It allows you type into the search field, things like "開く field:Expression” or “diplomat field:Meaning” or "木
wood:Meaning" "木 -wood:Meaning" thus limiting searches to specific fields.

I know everyone will disagree, but I sort of like the Tatoeba plug-in. I don't study the sentences. There's way too much other stuff to go through. But in a vocabulary deck, having a bit of extra context (especially if the definitions are limited), can be useful. I'm not looking at the detailed construction of the sentences, so the occasional error is not going to matter too much. In the examples below, at least I am reminded of different ways a word is used ie concrete and/or abstract, and I can sometimes notice interesting idiomatic usages. One can get a bit of useful information of this sort even from the English, without even reading the Japanese. Obviously the range of meanings for words will differ in Japanese and English. Looking through a largish number of sentences, conveniently collected for you, can give a few clues, to be later consolidated upon by further reading/listening.....

rachels Wrote:I'm surprised no-one has mentioned the download audio plug-in. It is so very, very useful. Hopefully most people know about it.

It was mentioned in the first response! By me. Did you not know where the audio came from? (JDIC) Or the plugin (our own RTKer Thurd) -- I posted a thread about how Japanesepodders made the audio a while ago, it's worthwhile to read about their efforts, to appreciate how these materials we sometimes take for granted are generated.

I use Custom Media Directory - to allow .media directories to be stored in a DropBox folder so that they can be shared with for example an iPod.
I sometimes use iknow_importer - to get decks that have been created on the SmartFM website.
Japanese Support - of course.
AudioDownload - very useful.

CJ

I use iAnki - I don't actually use the Anki desktop for reviews at all, it's all done using iAnki.

Going to investigate the audio download plugin...

Is there a way to see how many unique kanji are in a deck without having seen any of the cards?

Updated the first post with listings in replies. Actually are some good suggestions up there.

the "Example Sentence" plugin is amazing for straight vocab decks. I use it for the shared JLPT vocab deck and it is AMAZING

bizarrojosh Wrote:the "Example Sentence" plugin is amazing for straight vocab decks. I use it for the shared JLPT vocab deck and it is AMAZING

Just know that it uses the Tanaka Corpus, which is unreliable at best. Read up on the history of how it was produced and you'll see why it's risky to learn from. It undergoes some community editing, to what extent I don't know - but all the content in it comes from years of students of one Japanese professor submitting Japanese/English sentence pairs as homework, without much editing or consideration for how they were mined (e.g. many were taken from song lyrics, which are easy to mine online, but are often translated loosely to preserve lyricism etc.). The students had a quota to fill for their homework, so sloppy mining is to be expected.

If you want great sentences, try using EPWING dictionaries. Unfortunately there's no automatic way to extract them yet, but I'm working on that (eventually)...