Intermediate and Advanced use of Anki

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jeff_lindqvist
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Re: Intermediate and Advanced use of Anki

Postby jeff_lindqvist » Tue Jul 17, 2018 10:11 pm

zenmonkey wrote:Back up the media (Anki back-up does not back-up the media library)
The answer to your issue is going to breaking that out to different users and decks.

How many decks do you currently have? One per language?


The AwesomeTTS media is created on-the-fly, and I think I've chosen not to save the files after Anki is closed. I might be wrong, but I don't think that a folder with thousands of media files was the main culprit, but rather that the setting itself (e.g. the code snippet which creates the file and plays it back automatically) was already too big a change for the template(s) affecting a large number of cards. I remember having problems last summer by just adding one new deck with a low number of cards (say, fewer than 50), and no audio.

I have nine or ten decks, but since last year (when I encountered the sync problems), I don't add anything else but cards to the decks that are already working.
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Re: Intermediate and Advanced use of Anki

Postby Adrianslont » Tue Jul 17, 2018 10:57 pm

jeff_lindqvist wrote:
Adrianslont wrote:Wow! How many cards do you have Jeff?


A lot. (And that was half a year ago!)

OMG!
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Re: Interval Multiplier

Postby garyb » Wed Jul 18, 2018 9:30 am

zenmonkey wrote:If you are seeing "hard" and "good" at about the same interval what is your New Card - Starting Ease and Review - Easy Bonus settings?


Starting Ease 250%, Easy Bonus 130%. I can't remember whether these are defaults or I changed them, since I've not looked at those settings for a year or two.
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Re: Interval Multiplier

Postby zenmonkey » Wed Jul 18, 2018 11:12 am

garyb wrote:
zenmonkey wrote:If you are seeing "hard" and "good" at about the same interval what is your New Card - Starting Ease and Review - Easy Bonus settings?


Starting Ease 250%, Easy Bonus 130%. I can't remember whether these are defaults or I changed them, since I've not looked at those settings for a year or two.


Those are the defaults. Hard should then fall in between again and good. I'm surprised it is coming close to good.
But I get the desire to something to a hard that is closer to again. I have cards that, I feel I should not reset to again but want to see the next few day (rather than 2 months if I set to hard).

Here is an ad-on that links to the source code on github if you want to add buttons with different interval rules. https://ankiweb.net/shared/info/153603893
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Importing tables from a PDF into Anki

Postby zenmonkey » Fri Aug 03, 2018 12:29 pm

Notes on importing tables from a PDF into Anki.

Getting data from a PDF can be a hassle - one way of importing tables from PDFs into Anki is outlined below:

Get Table data from PDF

The software Tabula is an opensource tool developed to extract tables. It can be found here: https://github.com/tabulapdf/tabula/releases

1) select the relevant tables and export - export these in TSV format which can then be opened and edited in Google Sheets (you can also use Excel, etc. but character format can be a problem at times).

Open and Edit Exported Table

2) In Google Sheets clean up your data as needed removing headers, empty lines and then order the columns as described in the following video:


Import and clean cards
3) Follow the instructions in the above video for the importing. Export the file from Google Doc using Download as and selecting Tab Separated Values

4) Afterwards you may want to add or edit elements such as audio files in your cards by opening the deck and clicking on "browse" in Anki.

There are other methods for importing a pack of info (cards + media) in a single shot but that's for another post.
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Re: Intermediate and Advanced use of Anki

Postby Valddu » Mon Aug 13, 2018 5:19 am

The way I’ve been using Anki lately is to combine it with Subs2SRS and creating audio only cards from movies and shows I like. I listen to the audio clips over and over and try to transcribe them by hand. Finally I’ll click to see the answer and see if my transcription marches the actual lines of dialogue from the movie. Helps with my writing and I treat it as an intensive listening exercise.
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Re: Intermediate and Advanced use of Anki

Postby cpnlsn88 » Sun Aug 19, 2018 5:53 pm

Not an example of advanced use but an example of how to use Anki differently at an advanced level of language (In this case German).

I have a big deck of 17000 words which now gives me 10-20 per day (I downloaded the deck). It has settings that put successful words several years in the future. Failed words get sent a few months forwards. I tend to study words forgotten over the past 3 days. At some stage this will get retired.

I have another deck where all new words go and now has 3400 words. Words only come back for review after 3 months and several years if successful. Likewise I tend to revise any words forgotten over the past 3 days.

In addition I have created two additional decks. One is a deck devoted to body and health/illness, the other to idiomatic usage. Examples can be expressions, plurals where English uses the singular and interesting anglicisms. On these two decks forgetting leads to review the next day and a maximum period of 12 months.

In addition I have a 6000 word deck for genders which I downloaded. It gives me 30 per day but most are easy and a small deck of verbs and prepositions which might get assimilated to the idioms deck at some stage.

I think Anki can be helpful so long as kept in its rightful limits and you don't expect too much from it. Btw I never managed to delete or suspend leeches but would, for larger decks, simply push to the future (e.g. next year).

A background question to remember is if I meet a word now (given I look up and add every unknown word for German) that means I probably haven't encountered it in the past 3 years. Likelihood of coming across this word in the next 3 years is likely low, possibly zero in some cases. In the event I didn't encounter it again it hardly matters if I do or don't remember it. If I do encounter it I won't need to SRS it.

Wiser heads might counsel against what I do. The key thing is to be comfortable with some degree of forgetting and allowing for that in whatever SRS you decide on.

Important to change your settings for what you want to achieve with it and also make it tolerable to use. If irritating it's a good idea to change settings. Or of course scrap the deck!

I wouldn't necessarily use Anki for all my languages. I am also planning for some cognitive loss in older age where I think a small amount of daily SRS in a foreign language might be good for retaining mental agility so want to keep some decks for that purpose!
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Re: Intermediate and Advanced use of Anki

Postby Uncle Roger » Wed Aug 22, 2018 10:43 am

I don't see much use in figuring out advanced use options?

I think Anki is nearly perfect as it is. It's just really rubbish in, rubbish out, gold in, gold out. I just wish the options to change the intervals were a bit more intuitive, every time I want to change something I have to look up the Help page and even so some stuff I can't quite understand.

In a LIE (Listening Is Everything) perspective, Subs 2 SRS (into Anki) is the best thing to happen to my language learning after Anki itself.

But in general, Anki is only as good as the discipline and consistency you put to it. I'd find it more valuable to spend time researching self-discipline and habit building behaviours and tricks or whatnot than eternally refining content or variations of how it is presented to you.
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Re: Intermediate and Advanced use of Anki

Postby zKing » Wed Aug 22, 2018 8:01 pm

With my love-hate (mostly hate) relationship with Anki, I think for me the pattern is:

Beginner Usage: Add 10,000 cards to Anki
Intermediate Usage: Suspend 90% of the cards
Advanced Usage: Delete all decks and uninstall the app.

Slightly more seriously, IMO, 95% of the time used to create and polish cards is wasted, so every possible tool should be used to minimize that cost. I think that bulk importing via tsv/csv files is really useful. Ditto for Subs2SRS. AwesomeTTS and Add ons like the Chinese Add On really help to auto-fill fields to reduce the amount of card fiddling. As I've written elsewhere, I'm no longer a fan of getting 'input' via SRS as I hate spending time staring at the Anki screen and I believe that natural content's 'spaced repetition' is good enough to do the job and far more enjoyable with the benefit of varied context. But for output, I think SRS is extremely efficient and, for me, borders on necessity.
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Re: Intermediate and Advanced use of Anki

Postby Sayonaroo » Wed Aug 22, 2018 9:25 pm

zKing wrote:But for output, I think SRS is extremely efficient and, for me, borders on necessity.


What do you mean by that? Do you mean production cards? cloze deletion cards??
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