Anki question

[Markko]

Hello!

So, i've started using Anki about a month ago, i find it really useful thing, helps to save time and so on BUT there is one thing i'm wondering about. Since flashcards are descendants from the regular paper cards, it has two sides only. Probably it's everything a person learning words needs, in most cases learning a word takes two words per entry - the word and the translation, but don't we need 3 words? Pinyin + translation + hanzi + (some may need simplified+traditional). Before using the Anki i had big handwritten dictionary each string containing "hanzi - pinyin - translation", so, when i reviewed the known words, i put a piece of paper over the "hanzi - pinyin" part and tried to remember them both just seeing the translation, that was tough, but after i was done with studying, i could remember those words in months without reviewing it. In Anki, back side of a card usually contains "pinyin + translation", so seeing pinyin gives a huge clue to remember the words, and, what i'm really afraid of, when i'll have to remember the word with no pinyin clue, i won't be able to. So, the question are:

1. Do you have kind of this problem? And, if you do

2. What are ways you solved it?

[renzhe]

Anki lets you define as many facts as you want and then generate cards with any combination of them for each side.

This might not help you if you are using pre-made decks which didn't make use of this functionality.

In general, though, going from translation (in your mother tongue) back to a foreign word is fundamentally difficult because of synonyms, and will only work while your vocabulary is limited.

[navaburo]

Yes, Markko, for reviewing words or characters we have three seperate pieces of information (pinyin, hanzi, and "meaning"). As renzhe was saying, you can enter these as seperate components by using an Anki 'model' other than the default.

But, yes, ultimately, when you review, your flashcards will have only two sides: front and back. The question of how to distribute our three pieces of info between front and back is nontrivial.

My Anki setup is the following:

1) intensive reading deck: hanzi ==> pinyin + meaning

2) grammar deck: sentence ==> pinyin + meaning

3) writing deck: meaning + pinyin ==> written hanzi

Plus I use flashcards built into Pleco:

4) extensive reading deck: hanzi + audio ==> meaning

This is basically the setup that Katz of AJATT recommends, adapted for Chinese.

There are good reasons for not going from English to Chinese. I would not recommend it.

Have fun,

-Chris

[Gymnosopher]

Re multi-sided flashcards you can see it here on wiki too http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flashcards#Three-sided_cards - same as mentioned above. You can also see an explanation of how to do this on the Anki introductory videos about deck set-up (this one I think http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BI0aIoUSQ3o).

I also agree that English to Chinese has issues, something that I started to try due to wanting some sort of character writing srs. The problems of synonyms cropping up means you blur subtle differences that might exist in use, though as you say giving yourself the pinyin is a bit of a large hint. I've so far tried to add in example sentences with the word missing for me to fill in, and if all else fails I've written the 2/3 synonyms I'm getting for the same thing rather than just picking one and failing if it's not the right one, or passing and telling myself yeah I could have got that too.