pwharned / anki

tools and card templates for anki

Duolingo Style Anki Cards for Language Learning

Having used Duolingo for sometime I find its game based approach to language learning to be extremely effective particularly for internalizing vocabulary without painful force rote memorization for the following reasons:

1. Sound is almost always included - when learning a language listening and hearing words in context is the quickest and easiest way to internalize them.
2. The game, whether fill in the blank or otherwise is effective for keeping the user engaged without boring them (compared with a traditional flashcard system)

What I didn't like about DuoLingo was that it is very slow to introduce new vocabulary, and it is not an open ecosystem. So I designed Duolingo style flash cards that make Anki work similary to Duolingo.

1. User is presented with the English translation of a sentence in the target language.
2. The sentence is read in the target language
3. The individual words which compose the sentence in the target language are presented as clickable buttons.
4. When the user clicks the button, the word is added to a stack
5. Once all the words are clicked, the stack of words is tested against the actual sentence in the target language. If there is a match, the card is automatically flipped and then an ease is automatically selected. Otherwise, the sentence in the target language is displayed to the user.

The way I currently use this is by using the small python script to extract news articles in the target language, combine them with ML generated translations, and export them to a pipe-delimited file that can be imported into Anki. I listen to the audio transcription ( generated by Anki TTS) then I attempt to reconstruct the sentence by clicking the buttons.

Overall I am finding this to be infinitely more engaging and useful than traditional flashcards, where the word is presented out of context making it much more difficult to remember. Morever my listening skills in the target language increase as I learn new vocab naturally by seeing them presented in a context.

Setup

1. Install Anki TTS

2. Create a new note type using the provided templates card.template (front side) and card-back.template. Change the TTS tags to be the appropriate target language.

3. Add flashcards!

   Optionally, the script in main.py when provided the url of a news article as well as html element and class selectors can extract the text of a news article, translate it using the trans (brew install translator-shell) command and build a pipe delimited file that can be imported into Anki