In my previous post, I talked a little bit about my Anki deck, but I wanted to have a separate post to talk about it more in-depth.
I really, really like Anki. I like spaced repetition systems in general. Spaced Repetition System, or SRS, are basically designed to make you recall something right before you're about to forget it. I am absolutely not an expert on SRS so I cannot elaborate, but there are many articles and research around the web where you can learn more about the SRS. Both Anki and Wanikani use an SRS.
In this post, I will explain step by step how I set up and customized my Anki deck. I hope you will find something useful if you have been considering using Anki to help you learn!
1. Download Anki
First of all, you've got to download
Anki. You will need to download it onto your desktop, where you will be creating and customizing your decks.
Don't worry; Anki is mobile compatible. You can sync up the app AnkiDroid to your Anki account and do your reviews on the go! Once it has synced, you can do your reviews offline. This can be really helpful if you have a long commute and don't have access to mobile data.
2. Find Your Decks
Here, you have a few options.
The first, and easiest, is to use
AnkiWeb. When you open up Anki on your desktop, you will see a button called 'Get Shared'. Here you will be redirected to AnkiWeb, where you can search through a myriad of decks for all sorts of topics. There are many,
many decks for learning Japanese. (Note: even the name of the program, Anki/暗記, is Japanese for memorization!) Users are able to rate decks, so it's pretty easy to find a deck that's got what you're looking for.
Another option is to make your own deck entirely. There are many arguments to support making your own deck as the best way to use Anki. I actually tried this method, as I get the logic of making your own as you're spending more time with each word and putting in things like examples that are relevant to yourself. However, this was much too time consuming and I ended up ditching my handmade deck since it was so much easier to get a much more complete deck from people who have been studying Japanese for a lot longer than I have. Most of these large decks pull from multiple sources, which would have taken me weeks, months, maybe even years to gather all that data as well as
make sure it's all correct.
So, for me, I used yet another option. As this deck wasn't available on AnkiWeb, I downloaded
Nukemarine's Core 10k with Word and Sentence Audio. This is a huge deck. It's got plenty of information for each word, and even though I eliminated many columns I didn't think I would need, I still ended up with about 14 columns. Each of these columns will be assigned to a field, which I will talk about later.
3. Download and Import Your Decks into Anki
Once you have your deck, you can import it into Anki. If you're downloading from AnkiWeb, just use the handy links to import it straight into you desktop Anki. You can even search and import decks using AnkiDroid!
If you have an excel spreadsheet, like the Nukemarine 10k, you will need to change the file. Download the file as a .tsv or .csv ('tab separated values' and 'comma separated values', respectively). You can then import that .tsv or .csv into your Anki desktop app.
4. Creating a New Note Type and Assigning Fields
As I mentioned, each column in your file will be assigned to a field. These fields are how you will organize the layout of your cards.
First, I would make a new note type. That way you can make changes easily to your cards and only effect the decks you've made with this note type.
In the Tools menu option, go to Manage Note Types.
Then, hit the Add button on the top right.
Here, you can choose a note type that has different kinds of formatting. I usually just choose Add: Basic since I can create all these different note types later while editing.
Once you hit OK, it will ask you to choose a name. You can choose anything, but I usually keep it related to the specific deck I'm working from since, as you can see from my 'Note Types' image, I have tried to work with a lot of different decks, and made different note types for all of them. Once you have your name, select it in the following drop down menu and hit the Fields button.
Here, you will see all the fields for your new note type. Because we chose Basic, it only has Front and Back. So, now you can add, name, and organize your fields! When you import your deck file, it will assign fields in order of the columns in the file. Here, you can add what each of the columns is. Add as many fields as you have columns in your spreadsheet, and label them.
 |
| Fields for a new Basic note type |
These are what my fields look like:
5. Create A New Deck
You could easily do this step after all your cards have been imported, but why not just do it now.
On the Anki home screen, hit the bottom middle button that says Create Deck, choose the name, and you're done! Cool, now you have your empty deck.
6. Importing Your Spreadsheet
Once you have your note type and new deck set up, you can import your spreadsheet. On the Anki home screen, hit the button on the bottom right that says Import File.
On the import screen, choose the new note type and new deck you just created. Choose the correct file type below that ('Fields separated by:Tab' for .tsv and 'Fields separated by: Comma' for .csv). Because you are likely importing a huge vocabulary deck, I usually have it set to "Import even if existing note has same first field". Depending on what your first field is, this could save you some hassle. If you've grabbed a well know spreadsheet, there likely won't be many, if any, doubles anyway.
Next, field mapping! I would have your spreadsheet open elsewhere so you can double check that the correct columns are being mapped to the correct field. If you import it and a column was put as the wrong field, you can always change the field name and how it appears on your card later so don't worry!
Once that's done, hit import. Yay! Your deck is ready to go.
7.1 Formatting Your Cards
You thought your deck was ready to go? That's cute.
This is gonna be the biggest section, so it will be broken down into sections since it all has to do with coding.
Now that you've got all the information in Anki, you can choose what you want to see and what you want to make yourself recall. A basic deck will often have English to Japanese on one side, and Japanese to English on the other. That's basically how my deck is but there's a little more substance to it, mostly thanks to the Nukemarine 10k and how much information is provided in that spreadsheet.
Right now, my notes have 2 cards each.
All of the things in brackets, like (Vocab Kanji) and (Sentence Translation), are the fields that we made earlier. Formatting the cards is mostly just about organizing the fields in a way which is most beneficial to you. This layout is what has worked for me.
7.2 Basic Format
Okay, let's start work on making your cards less boring. First, you have to go back to Tools, and Manage Note Types. This time, however, we're going to his the Cards button. You will be brought to the Card Types window. Below, you can see my Card 1.
Without the additional formatting (size, colours, text fields, hints, etc.) my cards would look like this:
Front Side:
{{Part of Speech}}
{{Vocab Translation}}
Back Side:
{{Front Side}}
{{Vocab Kanji}}
{{Vocab Kana}}
{{Vocab Audio}}
{{Sentence Japanese}}
{{Sentence Translation}}
{{Sentence Furigana}}
{{Sentence Audio}}
{{Vocab RTK}}
{{WaniKani mnemonic}}
{{Notes}}
All of the information you want is here! It may be easier for you to test out your deck in the basic format like this to see what information you want to see, what information you want to recall, and what supporting information you want to show on the back side.
There is an Add Field button which you can use to quickly add fields and change their size. If you're adding fields manually, just use double brackets like this {{YourField}}. You'll know if the field is valid or not by looking at the preview on the right side:
Once the field is typed correctly, it will show the field name surrounded by single brackets in the preview.
7.3 Typing In Answers
For me, typing in the answers is something I absolutely need on Anki. You have to actually input the information you're trying to recall, or else you get a visual indication that it's wrong and how it's wrong.
To add a typing field, simply enter the following into the Front Template:
{{Type:YourField}}
And replace 'YourField' with the field that you want to type in to match.
Below, you can see the field before and after you've entered your answer. For the after, I've added two different incorrect answers so you can see how they will be displayed.
7.4 Hint Fields
Hints fields are easy to plug in, just like Type fields.
{{hint:YourField}}
Again, just replace YourField with the field you want as a hint, and you're done! I've been using the Wanikani mnemonics field as a hint for my English to Japanese cards, if I've added that Wanikani information in for that particular card. For the Japanese to Kana + English card, I've set the Vocab RTK as a hint, since its usually the literal meaning of the individual kanji, so it helps me work out the actual meaning of the vocabulary and sometimes the reading.
Below, you can see the hint field hidden, and then revealed:
7.5 Little Things
To make adjustments to the font and size of your fields, just wrap it in a <div> like the following:
<div style='font-family: Arial; font-size: 50px;'>{{YourField}}</div>
To make a break (or more) between fields, simply add a <br>.
To make a line to separate fields, add <hr>.
7.6 God This Deck Is Ugly (Changing Colours)
Don't like boring white cards? Neither do I. I liked how Wanikani uses different colours to differentiate between radicals, kanji, and vocabulary, and how that helped remind me what I was supposed to be recalling before I even look at the word.
To play with the cards' colours, you'll need to mess with the Styling section (between Front Template and Back Template). For the background colours, you can change it using these codes:
.card {
font-family: arial;
font-size: 20px;
text-align: center;
color: black;
background-color:#CCEEEE;
}
.card2 {background-color:#CCB8EE}
The .card code will already be there, so you only need to plug in a colour in the 'background-color' line. As the styling section affects both cards, you will need add a .card2 code. This is useful to have anyway in case you wanna change up fonts or sizes to distinguish the different cards (and you can just copy-paste the .card to make it super easy).
I used hex code colours, but you can even add certain colours by just typing in the name. I like the hex colours cause I could choose something really specific. You can find a colour picker that displays the hex code
here.
After I had my pretty card colours chosen, I realized that the Type field answer colours clashed horribly. Since this is obviously a really big deal, I had to change them using the following code:
.typeGood {background-color: #99FFCC;}
.typeBad {background-color: #927A9C;}
I kept with the 'green=good' idea, but the red was jarring and a little hard to see so I changed it to something that still stands out but doesn't hurt my eyes.
 |
| Angry colours do not spark joy |
8. For The Lazy People
Do you like how my Anki cards are set up, and really don't care how they've been set up? Don't worry, I gotchu! Posted in text rather than screenshots for your copy+pasting needs:
Card 1:
Front Template:
<div style='font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px;'>{{Part of Speech}}</div>
<div style='font-family: Arial; font-size:20px;'>{{Vocab Translation}}</div>
{{type:Vocab Kanji}}
<br>
<div style='font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px;'>{{hint:WaniKani mnemonic}} </div>
Back Template:
{{FrontSide}}
<hr id=answer>
<div style='font-family: Arial; font-size: 50px;'>{{Vocab Kanji}}</div>
<div style='font-family: Arial; font-size: 18px;'>{{Vocab Kana}}</div>
{{Vocab Audio}}
<hr>
<div style='font-family: Arial; font-size: 25px;'>{{Sentence Japanese}}</div><br>
{{Sentence Translation}}<br>
<div style='font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px;'>({{Sentence Furigana}})</div>
<br>{{Sentence Audio}}
<hr>
RTK<br>
{{Vocab RTK}}
<hr>
<div style='font-family: Arial; font-size: 20px;'>{{WaniKani mnemonic}}</div>
<hr>
{{Notes}}
Card 2:
Front Template:
<div style='font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px;'>{{Part of Speech}}</div>
<div style='font-family: Arial; font-size: 50px;'>{{Vocab Kanji}}</div>
<br>
<br>
Kana
{{type:Vocab Kana}}
<br>
English
{{type:Vocab Translation}}
<br>
<div style='font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px;'>{{hint:Vocab RTK}} </div>
Back Template:
{{type:Vocab Translation}}
<hr>
<div style='font-family: Arial; font-size: 18px;'>{{Vocab Kana}}</div>
<div style='font-family: Arial; font-size: 50px;'>{{Vocab Kanji}}</div>
<div style='font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px;'>{{Part of Speech}}</div>
{{Vocab Translation}}
{{Vocab Audio}}
<br>
<hr>
<div style='font-family: Arial; font-size: 25px;'>{{Sentence Japanese}}</div><br>
{{Sentence Translation}}<br>
<div style='font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px;'>({{Sentence Furigana}})</div>
<br>{{Sentence Audio}}
<hr>
RTK<br>
{{Vocab RTK}}
<hr>
<div style='font-family: Arial; font-size: 20px;'>{{WaniKani mnemonic}}</div>
<hr>
{{Notes}}
Formatting (effects both cards)
.card {
font-family: arial;
font-size: 20px;
text-align: center;
color: black;
background-color:#CCEEEE;
}
.card2 {background-color:#CCB8EE}
.typeGood {background-color: #99FFCC;}
.typeBad {background-color: #927A9C;}
BONUS ROUND*: Wanikani Mnemonics
*Bonus round only because you need to have a Wanikani subscription to access this information.
I have an additional field on my card for Wanikani mnemonics. I've so far only been adding them to cards that have become leeches (ie keep showing up and I keep not remembering them). A lot of my cards in Anki are vocab way beyond my Wanikani level. While I really like Wanikani's structure of only giving you vocab from kanji you have been learning, I just have too much vocab I already know and need to learn that I haven't yet learned the kanji for. So, I've put in the meaning and reading mnemonics for the individual kanji to help me learn them a bit better than through rote memorization.
There is a search bar on Wanikani, on both the desktop and mobile website. Here, you can search for your words. There are only about 6000 vocab on Wanikani, so you might not find your vocab but you still might be able to find the mnemonics for the kanji that make up your word.
Links:
And... that's it! There's so much you can do with Anki, and even though this is a very long post, it's actually an extremely simple way of using it. If you have any questions about my deck and how I'm formatted it specifically, please let me know! You can probably find everything you need to modify your Anki in the Anki Manual (linked right above this), and if you can't find it there, you can probably find a solution with a quick google search 😊.
