Hi!

I’ve started using Anki as an aid to my Japanese studies, and have found it to be an especially helpful tool. However, the software is definitely a power user application, and I have had a few questions come up.

I'm not entirely sure if these questions are best for the Anki forums or this forum -- many of them involve plug-ins that seem to have originated here. Please let me know if I should repost it elsewhere, and I would be happy to.

1. With the text box option, what’s the best way to make the software recognize whether I typed in a reading correctly? I know I can override it, but I would prefer the software be able to tell me if I typed it correctly for speed purposes (green versus red is easier to recognize.)
For example, I have a flashcard that shows the kanji “猫”. If I type in “neko”, it doesn’t recognize that the romanji corresponds to this kanji, and marks it wrong. If I use a Japanese IME to type ねこ, Anki seems to show several leading and trailing dashes, and still marks it as wrong.
Is there a way to have Anki add romanizations to an existing set of flashcards in order to use make use of this functionality?

2. It seems like it’s possible to allow Anki to keep track of which Japanese words I do or do not know, using some sort of morpheme tool. How do I set this functionality up? Can it be used with the Anki Android app?

3. Is there an easy way to feed Anki a list of Japanese words, and have it generate flashcards automatically for me, of the format “kanji/reading/definition”?

Thank you very much!

They are probably good questions for the anki boards -- particularly #1.

2 and 3, however, we have had some development on this board, so these threads should help you out:
Mighty Morphin Morphology -- I've never played with it, but I think the idea is that it keeps track of the words you know, so then you can automate an i+1 adding schedule. But I'm not really sure.

Rikaichan: RevTK Community Edition. It's Rikaichan on crack. You turn on Rikaichan, roll over a word/sentence you want, hit "S", import the file that it saves it all to --> instant cards.
On a similar thread, you could also use Yomichan -- Similar idea of auto-cards, but this time it takes place inside Anki instead of Firefox.

I'll go ahead and ask the text box question in the Anki forums, and read about Morphing things elsewhere.

For the Rikaichan/Yomichan applications, can these be used to generate a large number of flashcards from a list of Japanese words quickly? I haven't experimented with them all that much, but they seem much more focused on creating individual flashcards.

Thanks again!

Without seeing your cards, I don't really know, but, the text box 'answer' field is strictly compared to whatever field in the card it's being compared to.

If your card looks like,
Front:
猫
Back
cat: ねこ (noun)
Then you're going to get a bunch of red before and after the ねこ because only those two characters matched.

You can always go through an existing deck and add another field that contains just the reading, in roman characters or hiragana, or whatever you want. It might be a little redundant with your existing fields, or you might just be comparing against the wrong thing. I don't know a good way to automate such a transformation.

What format are you coming from? What format do you want the cards to be in when you're done?

If you have a list of Japanese words in a text file, and you're OK with just J->E translations from EDICT, open it up in Firefox, go down the list hitting "S" on each word. You'll be left with a text file you can import into Anki with all the words you went through. Sure, you have to manually hit "S" for each word, but it's a lot less word than doing it yourself.

I put a little more effort into it, because I go to yahoo's jisho and get example sentences I like. You can do that too; hit "S" and it will save the card with the word, reading, definition (english or japanese), sentence you found it in, audio...a whole lot of stuff.
And all you have to do is it "S". I'd play around with it if I were you.

I've checked out Rikaisama -- thank for the hint regarding automatically generating EDICT flashcards. Is there a way to automatically generate romanizations in addition to everything else? I'm still not having much luck getting Anki to compare kana to the kana fields.

My source for my flashcards is cb's Japanese Word Frequency List Generator. I take game scripts and run them through this program in order to generate flashcards for the vocabulary the game uses. They end up in the format "dictionary form - reading - translation", like the default for Rikaichan. There are no doubt ways to improve this process, but I'm still playing around.

Thank you!