Gleaves Posted February 5, 2009 at 09:40 PM Report Share Posted February 5, 2009 at 09:40 PM I'll wholeheartedly agree that the most important part of these flashcard programs is simply using them on a daily basis. Both Anki and mnemosyne have worked extremely well for me in that regard. For me personally, Anki's display features have helped me go through my cards with a little more ease. By changing some colors and font sizes, I can more quickly parse out the info. (Pictured is the web interface, not the local software). Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
HerrPetersen Posted February 7, 2009 at 08:05 PM Report Share Posted February 7, 2009 at 08:05 PM One motivational feature in anki is the hanzi-statistics plugin. It gives you information like this: Hanzi (simplified) statistics This deck contains 930 unique Hanzi. HSK statistics (characters): HSK Level Basic (甲) 656 of 803 81.69% Elementary (乙) 201 of 798 25.19% Intermediate (丙) 38 of 589 6.45% Advanced (丁) 20 of 670 2.99% Most frequent characters: 1 - 500 417 of 500 83.4% 501 - 1000 235 of 500 47.0% 1001 - 1500 145 of 500 29.0% 1501 - 2000 73 of 500 14.6% 2001 - 2500 36 of 500 7.2% 2501 - 3000 10 of 500 2.0% 3001 - 3500 4 of 500 0.8% 3500++ 10 Of course this can be used to fill up holes: when clicking on the numbers you get a list of the hanzi you have/you are still missing. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
holger Posted September 10, 2009 at 08:57 PM Report Share Posted September 10, 2009 at 08:57 PM a card has per definition two sides only.. if it has three sides it would look like a toblerone chocolate box and i doubt if any of you guys would call that a card. I managed to import my jmemorize chinese words list of 4117 entries into Anki today. I created a third field for separating the pinyin from the characters and everythings filled up fine now. The question is only how to assign these three fields to the question and answer sides for learning. I changed the order of the three fields in the deck properties by moving them up and down but in learning mode i only get two of the fields as question and answer each. sorry if this questions has already been dealt with before, i spent the whole day with regular expressions and list formatting and hope to see some results.... Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
holger Posted September 10, 2009 at 09:47 PM Report Share Posted September 10, 2009 at 09:47 PM oh okay... excuse my impatience everyone.. i found it myself. (solution: go to "settings" > "deck properties" > "edit model properties" > "card templates" and then use quasi regular expressions to assign the field names to question or answer sides. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Xiwang Posted September 11, 2009 at 12:04 PM Report Share Posted September 11, 2009 at 12:04 PM Does anyone have any opinions about which of these (or other) programs might best be suited for other non-Roman alphabet languages? I currently use ZDT for Chinese but am thinking of taking up Arabic again later this year. It would be nice to be able to use the same program for both. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
renzhe Posted September 11, 2009 at 12:09 PM Report Share Posted September 11, 2009 at 12:09 PM I'm not sure about ZDT, but neither Anki nor Mnemosyne should have any problems whatsoever with Arabic or other non-Latin scripts. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
chrix Posted November 20, 2009 at 05:57 PM Report Share Posted November 20, 2009 at 05:57 PM OK, I've only tried anki, but let me ask this way: do either of ZDT and Mnemosyne have any of the following features: 1. synchronising your cards with a server (from which follows: can be used online, also with certain types of mobiles) 2. audio feature (haven't tried it myself, so can't attest to its usefulness) 3. automatically filling in the pinyin and English/German translations, and also jiantizi/fantizi depending on what you prefer. Anki does all this using the pinyin-toolkit plugin (hat tip to phyrex for telling me about it) Especially 3. makes my life sooo much easier! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
renzhe Posted November 20, 2009 at 06:01 PM Report Share Posted November 20, 2009 at 06:01 PM Speaking of Mnemosyne: 1. No, but I think that it is being worked on 2. Yes. 3. No, because it wasn't designed to do that. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
chrix Posted November 20, 2009 at 06:13 PM Report Share Posted November 20, 2009 at 06:13 PM well, 3. is a deal breaker for me, because typing in the pinyin with the right tonemarks is such a hassle, or even if you have to look up the character first (especially if you're reading stuff that's not online). Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
renzhe Posted November 20, 2009 at 06:55 PM Report Share Posted November 20, 2009 at 06:55 PM No doubt about it, there are many useful options in Anki that cater to a wide range or users. Mnemosyne is very barebones -- it does SRS, it ONLY does SRS, and it does SRS well. Very easy to use, and never does anything strange with your data. Some people (including me) find this attractive. Personally, I never enter cards into the flashcard program itself. I always prepare a list of words in a decent editor (for example, while I'm watching a show, I have an editor window open next to it). Then I can process the list using a script, and import that. Not everybody wants to do it this way, so it's good to have choice. Personally, if I had to enter every card into Anki or Mnemosyne by hand, I'd die Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
chrix Posted November 20, 2009 at 06:56 PM Report Share Posted November 20, 2009 at 06:56 PM Hehe, absolutely. At the next meeting, we should definitely talk about how to effectively use flashcard programs and scripts and the like Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
jbradfor Posted November 20, 2009 at 07:24 PM Report Share Posted November 20, 2009 at 07:24 PM Speaking of ZDT: 1) No. 2) Yes. It will say the words for you. HOWEVER, I believe it is character-based, not word based, so multi-syllable words are not pronounced correctly. 3) Yes. If you look up a word in the included dictionary, you can drag-and-drop the entry into a word list. You can import a list of words that is only the characters, and if that word is in the dictionary, it will fill out the rest for you. There is an "auto-fill" option when you manually create a flashcard. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
chrix Posted November 20, 2009 at 07:30 PM Report Share Posted November 20, 2009 at 07:30 PM @jbradfor, I see. The pinyin-toolkit gives you an option of using google translate if it can't find it in its own dictionary (which I presume is based on CE DICT, but I'm not too sure)... Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
jbradfor Posted November 20, 2009 at 09:58 PM Report Share Posted November 20, 2009 at 09:58 PM How ZDT handles the situation in which the word is not in it's internal dictionary is a significant flaw in ZDT. Combine that with the fact that the internal dictionary is quite old, and it can get annoying. Clarification: ZDT has two ways to read in word lists, "import" and "restore". "import" is the official way, and ZDT provides a lot of flexibility in the format. The problem with it is that it tries to be too smart, and will lookup every word in its dictionary; if it doesn't agree your line is correct (e.g. pinyin doesn't match), it will flag it and not import it. This is actually a major pain, as I've found about 10% of the words it flags, so I then need to enter it manually. The other option "restore" is not really intended for reading in lists, but rather to go with "backup" feature. Because of this, "restore" will accept only one format and does no error checking. So if there is an error in the format, you will likely crash ZDT. However, the advantage is that it does no error checking, so if you get the format 100% correct, it will read in the files fine. [bTW, ZDT is quite happy with using numbers for tone markers, so there are no input issues.] Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
chrix Posted November 20, 2009 at 10:13 PM Report Share Posted November 20, 2009 at 10:13 PM [bTW, ZDT is quite happy with using numbers for tone markers, so there are no input issues.] Anki handles both. I noticed you converted the accented tone marks to numbered ones with the frequent chengyu list, is that your personal preference or some kind of requirement imposed by ZDT? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
jbradfor Posted November 21, 2009 at 12:51 AM Report Share Posted November 21, 2009 at 12:51 AM When you "import" a word list, or create a flashcard manually, ZDT accepts either. However, when you use the "backdoor" method (i.e. the "restore" feature), ZDT requires tone numbers. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
HerrPetersen Posted November 28, 2009 at 07:15 PM Report Share Posted November 28, 2009 at 07:15 PM Pretty cool is the web-version of anki, which in conjecture with dropbox (or similar) enables you to review stuff with media (sound pics etc). A howto is here: http://rtkwiki.koohii.com/wiki/Anki Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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