ANKI: How I Customized Mine and Use It (almost) Every Day

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:

Download Anki here

Download the Nukemarine 10k deck here

Wanikani

AnkiWeb

Anki Manual

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 😊.

Japanese Language Learning: What I'm Doing to Pass the JLPT N3

I am well aware that I haven’t made a blog post on this blog in the (over!) six months I’ve been in Japan. I have several posts in my drafts, and I had planned to draw some stuff to go along with them. That obviously didn't happen. We’re just gonna jump right into something here anyway.



My Japanese Language Background

I’ve been trying to study Japanese for many years. However, we’re gonna start from when I first started taking classes, which was September of 2016. I studied at the Toronto Japanese Language School (TJLS) for two years. The schedule was one class a week on Saturday mornings, September through June (following the Canadian school calendar). Over these two years, we wen’t through the Genki 1 textbook.

(I highly recommend TJLS if you're looking to study Japanese in Toronto!)

I also took the beginner Japanese course offered through the JET Programme prior to arriving in Japan. It was too low a level for me after taking the two years of TJLS Japanese courses, but I’m glad I took it anyway to reinforce that I knew the basics. I also got to meet a lot of the Toronto JETs!

So, when I arrived in Japan in August 2018, I was at about the N5 level of the Japanese Language Proficiency Test (JLPT). I could read and write hiragana and katakana, identify about 100 kanji, had a small vocabulary of about 500 + words, and could form very basic sentences.

Since I only needed a little bit of study to be able to pass the N5, I decided to challenge myself and take the N4. I signed up around the middle of September, and the test was on December 2. That gave me just over 2 months to go from N5 level (~150 kanji/~750 vocab) to N4 (~300 kanji/~1500 vocab).

I obviously failed spectacularly.

Even though I studied every day, and crammed often, I just didn’t have the time or the energy to move up an entire level in the JLPT. I was still getting used to a brand new job, living in a new foreign country, living on my own for the first time in years, being away from all of my friends and meeting tons of new people… it was a lot. It is still a lot, and I’ve been here for 6 months.

As soon as I took the test, I took a break from studying for basically the rest of the December. I took some of this time to make a solid study plan for the JLPT N3.

Goal: Pass the JLPT N3 in December 2019

Schedule: Learn all new material by September 2019, review and practice tests from September to December.


What I need to know (cumulative):

• About 600 kanji 
• About 3000 vocabulary
• 950~1700 study hours

Kanji


Kanji is always scary for people learning Japanese. Many of the Japanese people I’ve talked to don’t like kanji. Now that I’m nearing the intermediate stage of my Japanese learning, I’m actually starting to really love kanji.

For kanji, I’ve decided to use Wanikani. I started using it a few years ago, but it never really stuck with me. At the time, I thought the weird made-up radical names and odd stories weren’t the way I should be seriously learning Japanese.

I’m only level 5 in Wanikani as of March 2019, but I really love the program. I’m hoping to do about half of the Wanikani levels before the JLPT in December, which would be level 30. You can definitely do all 60 levels in about a year, but I have too many other aspects of Japanese to learn to dedicate that much time to Wanikani. I try to do my Wanikani reviews once a day, and the new lessons on the day they pop up. If I make it to level 30, there will still be some kanji required for the JLPT N3, so I'll just need to make sure I get to them through my other study methods.

Wanikani Crabigator and friends

Vocabulary


I spent most of January fiddling around with Anki. I ended up using the Nukemarine 10k with Word and Sentence Audio. Obviously I’m not learning 10 000 words before December, but this deck is incredibly useful. I would recommend it for the audio alone, but there’s tons of information for each word, like columns for furigana, multiple word frequency columns, and even a column for Heisig’s “Remembering the Kanji”. I went in and removed the columns I didn’t need but you could easily just import the whole thing, assign each column a name, and then pick and choose which ones will appear on your note when you’re formatting your cards.

It took me a long time to tweak my deck until it was easy and enjoyable for me to use. At first, my cards were ‘English vocab > Japanese vocab’ on one side and ‘Japanese sentence > English vocab/sentence’ on the other. I tried this method since I know that leaning vocabulary in context, ie in a sentence, is a better way to learn vocabulary than just translating a word back and forth between languages. Even though I know this, it absolutely did not work for me at my current level. I ended up avoiding my Anki deck for almost a month since it was too difficult to work with.

So, I changed my cards to ‘English > Japanese’ on one side and ‘Japanese > kana + English’ on the other.

English to Japanese
Side 1

English to Japanese
Side 2

Japanese to Kana + English
Side 1

Japanese to Kana + English
Side 2

I've been working with this deck for about a month and I like it!

One thing though: don't just jump in and study from the 10k deck. That makes no sense. I went in made another deck called Current, which only has cards which I have encountered before. That way, the focus is only on vocab that I need to learn (JLPT) and want to learn (like vocab from manga and other hobbies), that I've already encountered in some capacity. I have all my new cards in my current deck set to "new cards in random order" so that I can encounter very easy vocab alongside brand new vocab.


Reading

I plan to add more reading as I progress with Wanikani and my vocabulary deck, but for now I'm going through a couple of easy manga. One of them is Cardcaptor Sakura: Clear Card Arc and the other is とつくにの少女 (The Girl from the Other Side). Both of these manga are great because they both have furigana beside every kanji! I'm finding とつくにの少女 especially useful because of the way the main characters speak: the main guy speaks using kanji and in a formal way, while the little girl's dialogue is written only in kana and she speaks in a more informal (and, of course, childish) way.

とつくにの少女Girl from the Other Side

Speaking/Listening


For listening, I've started to listen to Japanese Pod 101 again. They have a ton of audio you can listen to, and they're organized by level. The even have some JLPT specific lessons where they go over the question formats and how to answer them.

Speaking is by far the my biggest weakness in Japanese. I'm really, really bad at speaking. I don't like making mistakes, and to get better at speaking you have to constantly make mistakes. It's how you learn. Even in my second language, French, I still get scared to speak it! Can I speak French? Yes. Will people understand me? Mostly, yes. Do I speak it? Nope, too scared to make mistakes. I try to encourage my students to be exactly the opposite of me and speak even if they're saying things wrong. That's how we can identify mistakes and how we can fix them!

So, to make up for me being terrified of speaking, I've started going to a local language exchange meetup.Generally, it's 15 minutes English only, 15 minutes Japanese only, 15 minutes English only, and so on. It's not always as structured as this because people are having genuine conversations so sometimes you're not paying attention to the time for each language. For me, this is an ideal way to get some speaking practice in. There are Japanese people practicing their English, and all sorts of other people practicing their Japanese. Everyone's learning, and lots of people make mistakes. Plus, you don't have the pressure of one on one instruction or online conversations like most places you can get speaking practice.





That's what I'm doing for my Japanese study at the moment! Let me know how you study and what you're study plans are!