How would you set this up in Anki

[Chief123]

You have 2 definitions or usages for the same character:

*啊 a B (P) "indicating elation, indicating doubt or questioning, indicating puzzled surprise, indicating agreement/approval"

*啊 ā B (P) used in direct address and exclamation; indicating obviousness/impatience/suggestion; used for confirmation

Would you put them together on one card or have two separate cards with their own definitions?

Thanks,

Mark

[SiMaKe]

FWIW, which way you choose is somewhat dependent on what your priorities are. If character recognition is primary, I would place all the variations/definitions on one card. This includes variations in tone as well as sound (e.g. 着 has not only different tones but also different sounds - zhe, zhāo, zháo, zhuó).

If "production" is primary (being able to recall the character given the definition), then each variation could have it's own card.

For comparison, Pleco's default is to consider a card a duplicate only if the simplified, traditional and pronunciation are all the same. So in the case of 着，each variation has it's own card.

One "workaround" for Anki would be to have two decks, one for recognition and one for production. This also allows being more selective in what you want to be able to produce.

I said "workaround" because Anki can be set to allow duplicates but that can lead to actual redundancies, which is most likely not desired.

Don't know if this helps, but it gives you something to think about.

[abcdefg]

I put such things on the same card. But @simake's answer is more comprehensive. In fact, I might start doing it the way he suggests. My Anki deck is "recognition" only, and I'm getting extremely stale using it only that way. Making a separate "production" deck might inject new life into my flagging Anki sessions.

[方便面]

I've personally spent lots of time switching between flash card sofware, primarily Anki and Pleco. Unfortunately, both have their pros and cons.

Pleco is awesome for its built in (both male and female) pronunciation recordings which are great for perfecting your standard pronunciation. Anki has this feature available but, in my opinion is not as simply added to a question or answer card.

Pleco is also, always with me and contains example sentences.

Anki, on the other hand, requires you to use your computer more and manually change the show and/or reveale sides of your cards.

Getting back to the thread question, I've also become stuck a couple of times using Pleco because of multiple character pronunciations and definitions. Also the depth of information Pleco offers on each character is often too much or irrelevant.

In the end, for the above, and a few other reasons, I am 100% confident that actually making you're own cards rather than relying on Pleco's dictionary entries or downloadable Anki card packs. And hence, I have settled for Anki rather than Pleco.

Would you put them together on one card or have two separate cards with their own definitions?

In my opinion, when you're reading, you need to be able to look at a character and know that a particular character has multiple definitions and they all need to be able to spring to mind easily. You can then chose the appropriate meaning through context.

Also, when you're doing your flash reviews, if your question on one "side" is the character: 给, and you need to recall the pīnyīn and the meaning on the other "side", there is no way to know whether you are being tested for gĕi or jĭ.

So, I put them together on one card.

I also use 2 templates. One for reading, one for writing, which are essentially just the opposite of each other.

Just to add, including information such as what kind of character category a particular character falls into, such as Phono-Semantic Compound, Meaning-Meaning Compound etc, as well as some notes for more difficult characters (such a nemonic or a story) has also be very useful for me.

I'll try and attach some screen grabs of my card layout, but no guarantees it I'll do it properly.

Good luck with it.

Reading.tiff

writing.tiff

input.tiff

reading phonosemantic.tiff