domokun1134 wrote:

I just started RTK (yay me!) and I haven't decided whether I should use Anki or this website for SRSing.

I know it's disapproved but I use both, along with an Excel spreadsheet where I note every failed kanji that I need to restudy more (2 times a week)

Anki seems like a PITA to me, for example I don't know how to prevent it from showing me cards for kanji I havent even studied yet

Anki had a feature for bulk disabling cards and re-enabling them later

Short explanation: no need to disable anything, don't answer the card yet, don't press the space bar!

Long explanation: I guess you use pre-made decks. Use the settings "Show new cards in order added" (which is by default the Heisig order for pre-made decks), modify the number "New cards per day" every day according to the number of kanjis you want to study (it means that you can study 19 today, and 23 tomorrow, you have the choice, exactly like the web site), and Anki will stop itself after this number is reached. If you see a new kanji that you don't want to study, don't press the space bar to see the solution and this specific card will still be marked as a "New card." If you pressed the space bar, don't be scared, there is hope: use the "Undo" feature, answer the last question again, and stop the reviews with the Close button.

But I don't know if Anki's algorithms for review are better. Right now I'm using both until I figure out what I want to stick with. Any opinions?

According to my experience with both, the algorithms are almost identical. New cards are reviewed early, old cards will be reviewed in a long time.

Last edited by mypapa12 (2009 November 23, 9:53 am)

I did the first half of mine on the site and the last half on Anki. Honestly, I found I like this site better for the kanji. There's just something aesthetically pleasing about it. Also, I don't know... I felt like the spacing on RevTK hit my "I'm starting to forget." spot better than Anki.

My girlfriend as well as a good friend of mine are both going through RTK right now and I heartily recommended this site above Anki.

P.S. I truly don't mean to slight Anki in any way. I use it every day for my sentences and it's fantastic I'm sure if you really knew your stuff with an SRS, you could match the timing from anki with this site. But I'm kind of afraid to screw with SRS time stuff.

I'm using Anki + ankimini, but with the RTK1+3 shared deck which has the keywords hyperlinked to this site. I haven't used the SRS features on here, but found this site via those hyperlinks so was already set up with Anki.

I just got past the 1500 mark, and it took me a while to get the workflow right, but this is working pretty well for me (c. 35-40 new cards/day, c. 80-150 reviews/day at the moment, although this has varied upwards or downwards a lot up until the past couple of weeks where I found a decent combination of settings and pace).

I read through the chapters, but do the learning in Anki itself - see a new card, have a look at the primitives, click the hyperlink to get here, pick / tweak / write a story, back to Anki, mark it as 'failed' unless I already knew it for some reason, repeat with the next card.

I have failed cards set to show again in about 4 hours, which gives enough time for immediate short term memory to forget them, so that if I answer 'hard' or 'easy' next time, there's a decent chance of still remembering the next day. There's usually 5-10 cards from the previous day that slip through the cracks this way and odd one I'll forget from earlier, but I'm not getting overwhelmed with reviews as long as I keep up an hour or two per day.

Rough idea of settings:

New cards in order due.
New cards first.
Review failed cards early.
Failed cards due - custom, 240 minutes

Did you try iAnki (or AnkiMini if you jailbreak) - I've found the interface for both is fine, and also lets you review offline.

There's really no question about it, Anki is clearly superior in every single way. However, Anki does take a while to get used to since it has so many features. I recommend you do NOT use premade decks and instead learn how to create your own. That way you can make your perfect deck which works just like you want it to.

meolox wrote:

Tobberoth wrote:

There's really no question about it, Anki is clearly superior in every single way. However, Anki does take a while to get used to since it has so many features. I recommend you do NOT use premade decks and instead learn how to create your own. That way you can make your perfect deck which works just like you want it to.

"that's just, like, your opinion, man..."

I prefer the site over Anki as I'm sure many others do so there is a question about it, a question of personal preference.

Give me a single reason why one would prefer this site over Anki. Good luck. Anything this site can do, Anki can do a lot better. Not only that, Anki can do a billion things this site can't.

The only reason one would ever prefer this site is because they don't know how to use Anki to its full potential.

Last edited by Tobberoth (2009 December 13, 10:38 am)

You don't need to use Anki more than once a day. And what aspect of the failed card handling behavior are you unable to emulate in Anki?

Squintox wrote:

resolve wrote:

You don't need to use Anki more than once a day. And what aspect of the failed card handling behavior are you unable to emulate in Anki?

I haven't used Anki since September so please forgive me if there was an update I haven't heard of - but there is no set time in Anki where the cards expire/become due, they expire throughout the day. So after you finish ~100 or so reviews, it wouldn't be surprising to find 5 reviews sitting there an hour later.

Also, RevTK "suspends" cards as soon as you fail them, Anki does not (though I guess you can emulate that with the leech feature). 

That said, I prefer Anki over RevTK, I completed RTK with Anki and I still like how I can look back at my stats (love the Anki stats )

No update. The problem isn't when cards expire, that's not important. If you decide that you will review once a day at 3 PM, that works fine. You don't HAVE to review a card the exact same second it expires, if you had to do that, this site would be unusable since it forces you to take all the cards in one go regardless of when you added them.

And you can set failed cards to be shown after new/expired cards, exactly emulating the RevTK behavior.

Tobberoth wrote:

Give me a single reason why one would prefer this site over Anki. Good luck. Anything this site can do, Anki can do a lot better. Not only that, Anki can do a billion things this site can't.

The only reason one would ever prefer this site is because they don't know how to use Anki to its full potential.

from another topic wrote:

If you're going to start over, take the opportunity and move over to Anki, it gives you a LOT more features.

If you have something positive to share about either software, please do so. To say that software xyz has a "billion" more features than this site is neither objective nor helpful for anybody.

It doesn't matter how much better X is than Y. Even if Anki has many features not available on this site, who are you to say what's better for another person? This site doesn't claim to be the swiss knife of SRS reviewing. Its goal is to help people study and review the kanji from RTK and complete the damned book.

If you can't respect the time and efforts I put on this site, the RtkWiki and community forum, then please at least keep your antagonistic comments to yourself.

* anki has no shared stories

my vote: use both.

Tobberoth wrote:

I am helping them by advice them to move over to a superior system.

Once again, you are stating opinion as fact.

Don't worry Fabrice, we all love you for your efforts. <3