zushi's place

Spent some time this week reading through the Anki manual, and found it a really rewarding experience.

For those not familiar with the app, Anki is an Open-Source notecard studying app. It's mainly used by students and language learners, but seems to be popular just among folks who likes to memorize things in a reliable way.

Looks like this:

My main use case for it has been studying Japanese, but more recently I found myself tossing random useful things in there too – like definition for some word I haven't encountered before, hard-to-remember names, keyboard shortcuts for Windows, that kind of thing.

From reading the manual, I found that it's surprisingly deep for something consumer-facing. As a developer with a bunch of things I wanted to automate, I had thought that I might need to write some APIs to interact with Anki, but now I think manual importing of spreadsheets is enough.

That does still leave the issue of creating the spreadsheets though. I've recently been using the “Language Learning with Netflix” Chrome extension, which unfortunately doesn't generate the romaji reading for Japanese words that were highlighted. I ended up writing a quick Python script on GitHub for it, which was pretty fun in it's own right.

Using Netflix with Anki has dual purposes. For one, it's given me a good reason to try out some different shows (Kakegurui was a recent one). For two, I'm actually kind of pumped to study these words now and see how well I can do after having them memorized.

Anyways, will report back on the experiment later. Hopefully if someone else is looking to study something, this post can point out some useful tools out there.

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Categorized under: #workflow