ZDT, ANKI and MNEMOSYNE

[Gleaves]

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).

[HerrPetersen]

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.

[holger]

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....

[holger]

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.

[Xiwang]

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.

[renzhe]

I'm not sure about ZDT, but neither Anki nor Mnemosyne should have any problems whatsoever with Arabic or other non-Latin scripts.

[chrix]

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!

[renzhe]

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.

[chrix]

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).

[renzhe]

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

[chrix]

Hehe, absolutely. At the next meeting, we should definitely talk about how to effectively use flashcard programs and scripts and the like

[jbradfor]

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.

[chrix]

@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)...

[jbradfor]

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.]

[chrix]

[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?

[jbradfor]

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.

[HerrPetersen]

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