Posted by trms 4 days ago
Commercial decks, where the deck maintainer is paid for his efforts, make a lot of sense.
And I suppose if they are making money out of the ecosystem, it also only makes sense that commercial deck makers make a contribution to the technology that makes it possible. I suppose I would prefer that be a contribution rather than ownership and custody, but I suppose Anki's license terms (it is AGPL3+ - I think without a CLA) prevents them closing it.
So cautiously optimistic
Writing the cards is engaging with the cards for some small subset of the population. I am part of that audience. But most people are terrible at it, and it's not an easy skill to build.
Ther majority of people who are interested in Anki -- and the vast majority of normal human beings with nonzero willingness to pay, which is a very unique subset of the population with goals that tend to look like "Pass X exam by Y date so I can [get a job|earn my citizenship in a better country|...] -- just want good pedagogical material wrapped in some control harness so they can treat some fraction of their learning the same way they treat going to the gym. Show up, put in the reps, get results.
[1]: https://til.andrew-quinn.me/posts/the-second-wave-of-spaced-...
* exclusively quiz entire sentences
* introduce around 500 new words (a nice mix of nouns, verbs and adjectives)
* use a wide variety of grammatical constructs (including all conjugations of the new verbs),
* and that have audio of a native speaker reading the entire sentence after I "flip" the card
Such a deck needs to be thoroughly designed, and while I could choose the new words and then write software to make sure they are all used equally in sentences and no conjugations are missing, I actually can't easily make sure they are correct and I can't record the audio of the text.
I would substitute "the material" for "the cards" in this sentence. Making the cards yourself is one way to do that, but it's not always the most time effective - imagine the extra work put onto a medical student having to make the cards for every subject they need to cover. That is what ankihub does and it seems to be very popular
But yeah: downloading the median deck off of ankiweb: very sub-optimal
I see lots of people also moving stuff with AI that will clearly be biased and force products down your throat. This might be the end of the internet as we know, but the next thing, although sometimes looks exciting, will be controlled by faceless greedy monsters.
I guess the fact that we all didn't prioritise those small businesses is getting somewhere
A significant number of anki users (eg: medicine, law - others) are working with pre-made decks and if you look at anki's competition - all of them offer pre-made decks as a key part of it. Medics have always used flashcards (many university bookshops sell physical flashcards for medics) and I don't each medical student would benefit from producing, eg, their own anatomy flashcards.
When I search for HSK vocabulary Anki decks or whatever they call it, I found almost exclusively sets of words that are the wrong way around. They showed me the Chinese characters and asked me what the English translation is. I was incredulous about how many wrong decks there are and that I could not find good decks. I was starting to wonder, if people are actually just using Anki to learn to read Chinese characters, one-way learning basically, only recognition not writing. Only for reading subtitles and such, instead of writing with friends. Or perhaps they have the illusion, that they are able to write, because they can type in the Pinyin, and will get a selection of characters, which they then can recognize. But I, I want to be able to properly write the characters myself. The crucial issue was, that I did not find a simple setting to invert the direction of translation of a deck. How can such a simple thing not be among the most easy to find actions to perform with a deck? I read something about it not being possible on mobile phone, but somehow being possible on computer, but not as simple as flipping a switch.
Ultimately, I abandoned Anki and recently proceeded made my own tool for learning the characters, that is highly configurable and that can change the direction with the change of one config attribute.
You built an entire flashcard app by yourself, but you couldn't figure out how to edit card templates in anki?
Ah who am I kidding, your probably just trying to advertise your app.
I have not much to gain from advertising my app. It is AGPL and I don't plan on ever selling it. If it is useful to other people, that's great. If not, then it will at least be very useful to myself. I don't see what's wrong with mentioning, that I build my own, especially since this is HN. We are not on TikTok here.
If that is the case, it could be corrected in the deck options. And if the English->Chinese cards are missing altogether they can be created from the note by adding a new card template to the note.
You can edit the structure of the card templates so they're the 'right way around' for you:
My issue is, that I also don't know where to find the functionality for editing the template. I also cannot find it under deck "Options" in the desktop app. There is sooo much in the UI, that I think it is possible, that I am simply overlooking it somewhere. The docs you linked don't tell me where to find that. No screenshots of any UI are visible. Even now, after you telling the I need to edit templates, I still cannot find the functionality in the UI. I simply don't see it.
My feedback at this point would be to make this something, that is easily discoverable for the user, or add screenshots of how to get there to the docs and have keywords in the docs, that will ensure, that when I search for how to invert a deck, I will most likely find that page of the docs.
Menu bar -> "Tools" -> "Manage Note Types" -> select a deck -> "Options" (in the side bar)
\documentclass[12pt]{article}
\special{papersize=3in,5in}
\usepackage[utf8]{inputenc}
\usepackage{amssymb,amsmath}
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\begin{document}
And why is it called "Note Type"? How does this concept relate to "Cards" or "Templates"?
Can you see, why one would have problems finding the correct setting?
EDIT: Now I found it under:
Menu bar -> "Tools" -> "Manage Note Types" -> select a deck -> "Cards" (in the side bar)
(1) The user has to know where to find that.
(2) The user has to know, that there is no short way to get to editing the attributes of the word shown, but instead, that they need to edit a template.
(3) The user has to know, where they will find the function to edit a template. I claim a normal user will not suspect this option to be hidden under "Note Types". What even is a note? Starting to use Anki, I would look for words like "Card", "Flashcard", "Translation", "Direction", "reverse", "training options", etc., but not "Note Types". It is a weird naming.
(4) A user will have to discover, that they are not supposed to click "Options", but "Cards". But that this brings up the card options, and that that contains the template, instead of the templates being something entirely separate, loosely coupled.
It is hard to include so much functionality in one tool. I understand that. But personally, I would have had to wade through every single menu item, to find this functionality, and this also explains, why in the past I have not been able to find this at all.
Anki is a platform, not a content creator. I would be thankful that someome shared their hard work of creating a deck that has all of the content to meet your needs.
For what it's worth, there are many "RTK" decks for Japanese that show english keyword on front and expect you to write the kanji before flipping.
Maybe search for an "RTH" deck to go along with the book Remembering the Hanzi.
Anki is an extremely powerful and feature rich software, and it seems that you barely scratched the surface before dismissing it.
Edit: it took me 10 seconds to find this deck https://ankiweb.net/shared/info/1489829777 there's probably a Simplified one as well. Good luck with your studies.
The deck you linked is not mentioning HSK in the description though. It was maybe 1 year ago or so, that I searched for HSK1-3 level decks and only got wrong direction ones.
I am searching again now:
(1) "HSK1 English" -- nothing
(2) "HSK1" -- lots of results, but also tons of results that are not relevant for me, because they are not for English. -- Results like https://ankiweb.net/shared/info/1474834583 -- but that is 1-4 which is too much for me. I either need the 1, 2, 3 levels separate, or 1-3 in one deck. Also finding https://ankiweb.net/shared/info/166845167, which is the wrong way around. Starts right away by asking me "的" instead of something like "(some description here)". When I go to deck options in Anki desktop app, I see "Display Order", but there I cannot select any "English -> Chinese". Tons of options, but none that inverts what the cards show.
One sibling comment informs me, that I have to edit a template somewhere. But I don't know where, and in the deck options I don't quickly see any template editing function.
And this has been my experience with pretty much every HSK deck I found there. It would seem silly, that everyone uploads decks in the "wrong" order. Which leads me to think, that many people cheat themselves, by only doing the recognition part of learning the characters. Why else would so many people upload decks, only so that whoever who downloads the deck has to invert them first, before using them. I also think that many learners are probably not aware of the issue with seeing the character first and then translating to English, in comparison with doing it the other way around.
So now lets do your "RTH" search:
"HSK1 RTH" -- " Error: Please log in to perform more searches."
I am sorry, I cannot even do a keyword search a couple of times??? I need to log in, requiring an account (!) to even find a suitable deck?! OK, at this point I give up again.