Where do you find words to add to Anki?

[Cactus543]

Thanks for introducing us to Anki!

I noticed you said that you make your own lists? How do you think of characters that you want to learn? Using HSK lists?

[abcdefg]

I noticed you said that you make your own lists? How do you think of characters that you want to learn?

I think everyone uses Anki somewhat differently. Personally, I mainly put words there that I sort of know by ear already from daily life so I can learn how to read them as well. Then I use Anki's spaced recall algorithm to master them over time and hopefully not forget them.

[chrix]

who are you thanking for introducing you to Anki?

Well, you can get a lot of shared decks on Anki, among them being a HSK word list (I would recommend learning the words in that word list, not the characters from it).

You can create your own lists fairly easily too. I cut and pasted some characters I wanted to focus on from one of the myriad websites that exist on this topic, and had the pinyin toolkit plugin run over them and extract the pronunciation and meaning for me (some of which must be corrected later manually, I'm afraid, but if you would be learning those characters anyways, part of your learning process could entail checking and correcting the characters in your Anki deck).

Last but not least, I also have an Anki deck where I enter all the vocabulary items I encounter in my reading. You might consider creating a deck with the vocabulary from your textbook, though I'd be pretty sure that someone already put that online....

abcdefg, we could discuss this in another thread maybe, but what do people think about splitting their vocabulary into several decks as opposed to lumping them all together in one ginormous deck as the creator of anki seems to be preferring?

[imron]

who are you thanking for introducing you to Anki?

Admin note: I moved this post from here and put it in its own thread. It then got answered before I could put up the explanation

Incidentally, this shows why you should create new threads if you have a new question (and why admin can sometimes be a bit pedantic about moving things). Unrelated questions asked in a given thread might not be read by anyone who has decided that thread is no longer worth reading. If you put it in its own thread you'll potentially get answers much more quickly (in this case 2 in as many minutes, barely after I'd moved it).

[kdavid]

Input whatever vocabulary you're learning. Assuming you have some cornerstone to your studies (i.e. textbook, podcasts, movies, tv, etc), just input whatever you learn, or need to learn.

[eya323]

I have two decks so far. First, there's a good HSK sentence deck that I've found very helpful the last few weeks. Second, I have my own deck that I fill with vocabulary words and phrases from my class that give me trouble, as well as phrases I find interesting from 好想好想谈恋爱.

I have only used Anki for a few weeks, though, so others may have better advice.

Good luck!