ZDT vs. Anki SRS

[shibole]

Greetings. I'm currently using Anki (the SRS tool, not the palmOS flashcard thing) and I'm interested in knowing if anyone has compared it with ZDT and what they thought of the two. I feel like Anki has a more advanced SRS model but I don't know if it's enough better to make a difference. Anyone have any opinions?

[bogleg]

I just downloaded it and it looks quite nice. If people are interested in this program, I can add support for exporting to it's deck format.

Anki does have some nice features like the ability to add your own sounds and images to cards which is a request people have been asking for to be included in the ZDT. It's also a more general flashcard system which can be used for any area of study. I won't comment on the SRS capabilities since I haven't played with it long enough. ZDT's is modeled after the SRS system used by the flashcard program iFlash. From feedback, it still needs some work though.

Chris

[F_Kal]

I for sure would be interested for an Anki<-->ZDT format exchange ;-p

[shibole]

I tried to do an import in the other direction using CSV, which worked, but some of my fact expressions got filtered because they weren't in the dictionary. This is enough to keep me from using ZDT as I often want to test myself on proper nouns and translations of phrases and stuff....

I need to spend some more time messing with ZDT though. I suppose there's probably some way to add new dict entries but it would be nice if imports did this for you or something.

I like how Anki lets you basically put anything into it and leaves it up to you to test yourself and tell it if you got something right or wrong. Also being able to tell it "how well" you remembered something is quite useful.

For the "production" cards I typically test myself on writing by writing on DimSum's handwriting recognizer (or paper) then tell it if I got it right when I flip the card. I don't really need the handwriting input thing though... maybe I should just buy one of those wax slate things at a toy store.

[Luobot]

Just a first impression: ZDT has the advantage of ease of use, at least at first glance, and it’s tailor made for Mandarin. Also, ZDT has many flashcard decks ready to go, which can be viewed and edited in any text editor (such as Notepad). Importing and exporting flashcards is a snap. This suits me because I find creating flashcards to be boring beyond tears (though I don't mind editing audio files, just for the record). Anki seems to be initially geared for learning Japanese. The only Anki Mandarin flashcard decks I found on the web were for use on a PDA (not a desktop) and were in a format that can’t be viewed or edited with a text editor. With ZDT, I was able to get going without reading its help file, which is a good thing since it’s the one part of ZDT that I have trouble accessing for some unknown reason (but that seems to be a quirk of my installation rather than ZDT). Anki is not so intuitive, and I would need to read its help before I could really make use of it (which I haven’t yet done). ZDT brings together flashcard, dictionary, annotator, and stroke order animation, while Anki really focuses on flashcards. But for the purpose of flashcards, only, Anki may have more advanced features, once you figure them out and spend the time setting the program and flashcards up. This may be well worth it, but I haven’t invested the time to verify that. ZDT will eventually (based on Chris’s pledges) catch up with the most critical features, such as the ability for users to add sound files, images, etc. And Chris also already mentioned improvements in the SRS. Ultimately the best program tends to be the one that receives the most support. ZDT seems to have an active user base and Chris is extraordinarily open and responsive -- encouraging signs for ZDT. Again, this is just a first impression of Anki at a glance.

[shibole]

The decks for the "Anki PalmOS" (which seems to not be an SRS and be totally unrelated to "Anki SRS") are in some special format. I was able to install the palmos anki deck builder tool (windows app) and export the Integrated Chinese "Anki PalmOS" decks to text. I was then able to finally import them into Anki SRS after a bit of screwing around with a text editor.

This all worked, but I finally just decided to add stuff to Anki SRS by hand as I go since, if you're going to study a word, it seems reasonable to type it yourself at least once.

One thing that you didn't mention is that with Anki SRS you can synchronize your decks to the Anki web site so that you can practice with them from net-enabled mobile devices or any web browser. Right now I personally only use this feature as a sort of off-site backup of my decks though.

ZDT seems like it will be more useful once I get past this basic level where I'm having vocab "fed" to me mostly. ZDT is nice since you can drag words into your vocab list from the dict or annotation thing, I think.

I don't think ZDT has a concept of "production" rather than just recognition. For Anki SRS "production" I write the answer on paper (in hanzi) and then compare my result manually.

[nairbv]

there's also mnemosyne, ... it's an SRS, easy to use, and it has pre-built decks for HSK characters and words broken up into four levels of difficulty.

I've been using:

ZDT for my weekly shengci from class (making a new deck for each lesson, it helps me prepare for tingxie and keep track of individual lessons). I like being able to just type a list of characters into a text file, import them into zdt, and have it pick out definitions for me. I also use ZDT a lot as a general dictionary.

mnemosyne: I use on a daily basis to just generally attack a massive collection of words and have some idea just how many characters I know. I like the SRS functionality and I like the pre-built HSK databases. I'll probably keep using this one forever, even when I'm not full-time studying chinese anymore, so that I can know that I still have a large set of characters stored away in my head.

anki: I've been experimenting with this one, trying to add sentences to study. I'm using this after reading the "all japanese all the time" blog. that blogger says sentences are the way to go, .. and anki seems well suited to adding full sentences. One "add" will generate two cards, ... one that presents pinyin and definition so you can test your ability to write the sentence, ... and another card with the chinese so you can test your recognition ability. pinyin is automatically generated (and I wrote a plugin that improves upon the pinyin generation), but you have to put in your own translations. anki seems to be pretty customizable, and I like that the database is backed up to a web page (I lost my zdt database a number of times when the database somehow got corrupted, there was some kind of bug in windows vista). I'm still looking for some kind of big corpus of good chinese/enlgish sentences that I could easily import into this SRS. so far I've just been lazily periodically adding sample sentences from the grammar part of my textbook, but it's not really fast enough for me to build up a big database of sentences.

[bogleg]

Hi nairbv,

Any details on the Vista bug you say corrupted your database? Anyway sorry about that.

I want to say though, that ZDT always does an automatic backup to your user folder. (on Vista: C:Userszdt.backup) As a second line of defense you can also specify a second auto backup (to your own location) in the preferences by going to Window > Preferences > General. And lastly, you can perform a manual backup yourself by going to File > Backup Data.

I hate to have people lose their data, so hopefully this helps someone.

Chris

[shibole]

I just wanted to point out that Vista has some sort of filesystem "snapshot" feature that allows you to restore old versions of files. I believe it's the same system used by the win2k3 DFS (Distributed File System) and you access it by right clicking on the folder that the file is in, selecting properties, then clicking on the appropriate tab. You should be able to open an "old version" of the folder this way and copy the file out.

It isn't called "DFS" in Vista, and it may not be turned on by default (I think it is though), but it's worth looking into. It may allow you to restore the file from a day or two ago, or a week ago.

I'm not that familiar with the Vista implementation because I'm not crazy enough to use Vista (I never use an MS OS until it's been out for 2 years, or there's one service pack available, though with Vista I think I'll make an exception and wait even longer.)

I also recommend buying an external USB drive and setting up some sort of automated backup to it. I believe that the backup utility in Vista makes this much easier than the ones that comes with XP. (They improved the task scheduler and stuff quite a bit for Vista.)

[nairbv]

chris:

I talked to you about that vista issue a while ago via email, .... and I think you fixed it, ... I haven't used the ZDT flashcards as heavily lately so I can't really confirm that it's fixed, but you did already make a change with regard to that particular issue I was having. I'll let you know if I ever have it again, but for now no worries.