Anki card design.

[Ccaesar]

Hello everyone
I was going through some threads about anki that people have posted and I was curious what your typical card actually looks like.
Does it have a lot of categories on one side and not on the other? - Do you create your own note type where adding information to one "box" creates new cards?
- what does your cards look like (a screenshot would be cool)
- how do you make the crafting process easy/ier

[Cavesa]

Thanks for a great thread! I am looking forward to reading various answers!

In general, I try to keep things simple.

1.classical one word cards, with a hint sometimes (to make it easy to choose the right synonyme for example. So, the question might be "to be (not ser)", and the answer will be "estar"). I am abandonning anki for those a bit though, as I prefer typing and memrise is much easier for creating the typing cards. I was explained several times how to make that work in anki, never understood. I already abandonned my verb drills for memrise too, exactly because of the ease of making typing cards (those cards in my decks are like Q: je FAIRE passé composé A: j'ai fait

2.cloze deletions. That's what I like anki for now. I have started a new deck recently, I copy there a sentence or a minidialogue, cloze delete everything interesting at this point (so one sentence can become several cards, hiding two new or less new words, the right preposition, the right verb form, the properly declined noun, article, etc). The hints are very short

This is a copy of a card with two gaps, this card is asking about the Gap2:

Was machst du heute Abend? Lass uns etwas zusammen machen.

Tut mir Leid, aber ich kann nicht. sorry

Warum nicht?

Ich muss heute Abend [...] gehen. do práce

The "sorry" is asking for the first close deletion "Tut mir Leid", the "do práce" is for the other one "zur Arbeit", where I am testing myself on the declination, not the word. As you may notice, I give myself hints in any language that is more practical at that moment, especially as Czech is really close to German sometimes, so why not. Whichever is more practical at the moment.

3.I plan to do a third type of a card, again cloze deletions. I got myself a few bilingual wordbooks, which are based on example sentences. I find that excellent and want to make bilingual cards, testing myself on the key words from the German sentence, and (when useful) in the source language too.

How to make the process much easier: copying from digital formats, that saves a lot of time. I was about to buy a "scanning marker", a sort of a pen shaped device, that looks like an ankier's dream come true. For now, I don't trust it much, the reviews that are not on the official site are a bit more reserved as to its functionality. I dream of such a tool (especially for some other ankiing I want to do), but I want it to work perfectly, before I pay quite a lot of money for that. And truth be told, I'd like to price drop a bit too. Like at least by one third.

[gsbod]

Sorry, this is going to be quite long, and no screenshots either.

I'm currently using Anki to support my study of Spanish, although I've previously used it successfully for Japanese and German, and I'll be using mainly Spanish examples to explain further as this is the most recent.

My preferred note type has 3 fields: Spanish (or whatever language I'm learning at the time), English and Notes. It generates two cards for me, Spanish > English and English > Spanish. The Notes field displays as part of the answer for both card types. This is the basic card format I've used for any language I've spent serious effort learning, although over the years I have perfected the way I choose material for my cards.

My cards contain a combination of single words, colocations/phrases, sentences, and even some short dialogues, although I keep the number of longer cards down to a small proportion of the deck as a whole to make reviewing as quick as possible. So for example, most cards are along the lines of: la manzana / apple, el mono / monkey (m), la nariz / nose. Naturally, for a language with noun genders expressed through different definite/indefinite articles, I include an article along with the noun. For languages with difficult plural forms (hello German) I'll often include the singular and plural form of the noun on the same card. Since in Spanish the difficult plurals are exceptional, I'll make a separate card for these, e.g. to make sure I pick up the accent mark on las imágenes / the images (and even with this example, at some point it'll become obvious to me that the accent mark belongs there, at which point I'll no longer worry about making cards for that kind of thing).

If I'm learning a word which has a synonym I already know, I'll include this on the English field. So a recent example would be: el televisor / television (la televisión). This gets trickier to manage once I know 2, 3, or even more synonyms for a word, but at this point I'll be B2+ and will likely stop using Anki anyway as I just don't find it worth the time at the advanced levels (I appreciate some people here find the complete opposite to be the case).

I also have quite a few cards for colocations like tocar el piano / to play the piano, or jugar al fútbol / to play football, given that both verb and preposition usage is a little tricky from the point of view of a native English speaker.

At the other extreme, I've just created a card for the following short dialogue lifted straight from my textbook, to illustrate the meaning of "ya" when used with the pretérito perfecto, for which the extra context and the contrasting translations in English is a good study point:

- ¿Has hecho ya las maletas?
- Sí, ya las he hecho.

- Have you packed the suitcases yet?
- Yes, I've already packed them.

I don't always use the notes field, it's mainly there if there's something I think will catch me out at a later date, or something I want to make sure I pay particular attention to. So for the example above I've added the note:

hacer las maletas = lit. to do the suitcases
Note use of ya in pretérito perfecto

Some other examples of things I've put in the notes field for various cards:
- Note gender (for words like el idioma/el tema/la radio)
- "That" translates to "esto" rather than "este/esta" if it is not used with a noun (for the note ¿Qué es esto? / What's that?)

I'm not making myself type the answers at the moment, although I suspect it would be even more effective if I did, since you can trick yourself that you got certain details correct when in fact, you didn't...

With Spanish, I have also set up a deck specifically to drill conjugations. The notes have the following fields, with an example to illustrate:

- VerbTense: comer present tense
- VerbMeaning: to eat
- yo: como
- tú: comes
- él/ella/usted: come
- nosotros/nosotras: comemos
- vosotros/vosotras: coméis
- ellos/ellas/ustedes: comen

This generates a whole load of cards, including conjugating all parts of the verb together, and then each one separately, with question cards like:

Q: comer present tense

(to eat)

yo

A: yo como

I have separate cards for él/ella and usted and ellos/ellas and ustedes, since the use of third person for usted is not entirely intuitive for me, but to save time and space I group the following pairs of prepositions together to make 4 cards rather than 8: él/ella, nosotros/nosotras, vosotros/vosotras and ellos/ellas.

To start with I used bold font to emphasise where the stress was on the conjugated verb (e.g. comemos), but now I'm more used to where the stress goes I no longer bother.

In addition to verbs in the present tense, I've also got verbs in pretérito perfecto and present continuous, plus some reflexive verbs in all of the tenses I've learned to date. I will add more tenses as and when I study them.

The main difference for my Japanese cards for my main vocabulary deck, back in the day, was that I used the Japanese extension to insert furigana on the answer cards. I also had a whole deck for practicing reading and writing words in kanji, with cards in the following format:

Card 1:
Q: 天気
A: てんき
Weather

Card 2:
Q: てんき
Weather
A: 天気

I would type in the answer to Card 1 in hiragana, and write out the answer to Card 2 in a notebook of squared paper. Overall I spent hours on this, and by the end of it my notetaking in Japanese was still painful and slow. I don't think it was worth it! My main vocabulary deck, on the other hand, worked pretty well for learning to recognise and read words written in kanji.

[tangleweeds]

Thanks for a great thread! I am looking forward to reading various answers!

I agree!!

How to make the process much easier: copying from digital formats, that saves a lot of time. I was about to buy a "scanning marker", a sort of a pen shaped device, that looks like an ankier's dream come true. For now, I don't trust it much, the reviews that are not on the official site are a bit more reserved as to its functionality. I dream of such a tool (especially for some other ankiing I want to do), but I want it to work perfectly, before I pay quite a lot of money for that. And truth be told, I'd like to price drop a bit too. Like at least by one third.

I'd wanted a hand scanner for years, but can't you now do anything such a device might with nothing but a phone and Google Docs OCR?

[tangleweeds]

I make vast multisided meta-cards that spawn as many sub-card variants as possible. Entries equally likely to be words, expressions, phrases, or sentences, anything that's given me trouble, and then Japanese adds kanji to cause more trouble too. I like to spawn lots of sub-cards from one multi-field meta-card, because some aspects of the word/expression/sentence I will learn almost immediately, while others can take much longer. After auto-generating all the variant cards possible, I can swiftly retire the easy ones and only keep the challenging ones (e.g. I know it but can't spell it, or I know it but my pronunciation still sucks).

Speaking of which, one thing I've loved about Anki for years (particularly before many language sites/apps implemented it) is that an audio clip can be made into a pronunciation card, on which you can record your pronunciation to compare with the card's audio file. The same sound file might appear in both listening card and one requiring that I type in the expression to test spelling/diacritics (not a strong suit of mine). And of course there'd also be all the other card variants you might expect.

I also mess with the innards to change the SRS timing, because the standard research-based timing has never been effective for me. In all honesty, this is because I only (used to) do flashcards when I have time to kill on transit, in waiting rooms, between appointments, etc.--now that little of that is taking place anymore, I only pull them out when at loose ends between other tasks. The common factor here is that I rarely ever review them on the optimized SRS algorithm's timing, only when it's convenient for me. Given all that, I do better when I frontload with a bit of overlearning early on, so some cards can get killed off almost immediately, and the others require less frequent reviews to get retired, or shot deep, deep into the future. All to prevent the dreaded pileups possible when making so many cards.

[Edit: When re-reading, I realized that creating all of these possible sub-card variants is part of this front-loaded overlearning process. Once that's done with, many of them can get retired quite soon]

[Apologies for the many edits, I always accidentally hit Submit instead of Preview, then find a million typos, spelling errors, and/or missing words.]

[rdearman]

Thanks for a great thread! I am looking forward to reading various answers!

I agree!!

How to make the process much easier: copying from digital formats, that saves a lot of time. I was about to buy a "scanning marker", a sort of a pen shaped device, that looks like an ankier's dream come true. For now, I don't trust it much, the reviews that are not on the official site are a bit more reserved as to its functionality. I dream of such a tool (especially for some other ankiing I want to do), but I want it to work perfectly, before I pay quite a lot of money for that. And truth be told, I'd like to price drop a bit too. Like at least by one third.

I'd wanted a hand scanner for years, but can't you now do anything such a device might with nothing but a phone and Google Docs OCR?

I remember EMK just took photos of Egyptian Hieroglyphics with his phone and loaded them into anki. A quick fast easy solution. Many PDF's you can just copy and paste if they aren't locked.

[Cavesa]

I remember EMK just took photos of Egyptian Hieroglyphics with his phone and loaded them into anki. A quick fast easy solution. Many PDF's you can just copy and paste if they aren't locked.

The not locked pdfs are wonderful, I agree. Also some other resources. For example, I am making myself cloze deletions out of the Speakly minidialogues, copying them on cards (the quote is actually one of them). I find it absolutely weird, that a site based on cloze deletions doesn't directly use the awesome minidialogues for cloze deletions and srs too. But any other website based resource is also ctrlC and ctrlV friendly. (but I've seen one website, where the part most likely to be copied and ankied was blocked from being copied, but that was for different learning than languages).

Yes, photos are an option. But somehow, I find them extremely annoying to make, use, etc. I was unable to keep up even with the ankimaster app, which is meant exactly to test you on photos of whole pages or their parts.

I struggle a lot getting myself to Anki. Every step between me and the desired reward (=having cards I can use and just learn) is a problem as it is brutally lowering the probability of it ever happening. So, that's why the text scanner pen was so tempting for me, it would be ideally faster, more comfortable than typing (which is otherwise a useful activity for me, it just gets annoying, when you type too much), and less annoying to me than taking a photo, finding the photo, adding the photo into anki, figuring how to make cloze deletions on the photo,...

[rdearman]

Recently I have been making a lot of cards for French & Italian. My typical card is just English Sentence in Front, with TL sentence on back. The process is pretty simple. I have the basic card, it has Front, Back, Audio, and Extra Info fields. I only every really use Front and Back. I put English in the Front, and the TL in the back. I mine sentences from Language exchanges I've had or a book I'm reading. Since I'm mostly taking these from corrections given during language exchanges I can simply paste the TL into the Back field and put the translation in the front. Oh and I use the default Ankidroid TTS to read out the back of the card in the TL for me.

screen_anki.png

I have added some Cloze Deletion cards, but very few.

Screenshot from 2020-08-23 23-05-29.png

In the past I have used Subs2Srs cards a bit, and I'll proably start using them again soon for mandarin. Although the screen grab is for Italian. I did a youTube series on how to create these from films.

screen_anki_subs2srs.png.jpg

[smallwhite]

rdearman
> I have added some Cloze Deletion cards, but very few.

Your card reads:

to know (ind. pres.)
=========
I say
You say
......

Was that by intention?

[rdearman]

rdearman
> I have added some Cloze Deletion cards, but very few.

Your card reads:

to know (ind. pres.)
=========
I say
You say
......

Was that by intention?

Yes. That is all the various conjugations of sapere.