My thoughts on Anki 2

[Manuel]

Although I do not use Pinyin Toolkit myself, it has much to offer and I can see how it'll be missed by many v2 users.

Snigel, I have just read several articles in your blog "Hacking Chinese" as well as your personal blog and I think they are both very good. Today I have learnt much from you. Thank you.

[eloper]

Yeah, the extended functionality provided by Pinyin Toolkit is missed. But work on a replacement, Chinese support, is coming along at an impressive pace. I still can't place the criticisms i've seen on Anki 2 itself though - its an improvement on the earlier versions, but like srs itself, takes time to get the most out of it. cool website btw snigel, like a little allchineseallthetime.com

[tjw344]

hanyu_xuesheng, you prove your lack of understanding with your statement about wanting to delete templates. Templates should not be commonly deleted or created. That is why they are further in the menu. If you are creating and deleting templates frequently you are doing something wrong. I have 5 templates with over 8000 cards and many diagrams, complex structures, clozes, and basic cards. Anki2 makes creating cloze a breeze. highlight, then select the cloze button. Incredibly complicated templates and addons can be used to make creating cards much faster. I find the new interface much better. Making the switch to anki2 from anki1 I suggest not making many templates and simply letting the decks, tags, and filter/cram decks do the organizing if you like to move cards around alot. I really don't understand why you be doing this frequently. Explain it to me and I will give you a very simple way to deal with it. As for creating an empty deck it is as simple as selecting add -> selecting the deck button -> then add, type in the name and done.

[hanyu_xuesheng]

hanyu_xuesheng, you prove your lack of understanding with your statement about wanting to delete templates.

I never said that I have a detailed understanding of the Anki 2 internals. But the existence of some templates (after some imports) that are not used, and the existence of a very hidden function within Anki to delete them, tell me that I am not totally "lacking understanding".

As for creating an empty deck it is as simple as selecting add -> selecting the deck button...

This button did not exist in Version 2.0. It was introduced some days ago with v.2.0.2.

Some posters in this thread wrote that I should better contact the author of Anki, Damien Elmes. Well, I did this in an Anki forum thread, and the author seems not very happy to see any criticism about his software in his forum. He closed the thread https://groups.googl...srs/rjK6roR1gFI with the words: "... if you simply come on here and complain and call things stupid, you're likely to be ignored." (and I did not call his program and the features "stupid" in any of my posts, I just criticized the difficult to tackle and quite unorthodox and not ergonomic GUI structure and some other features of Anki 2, and I asked why these design decisions had been taken. No answer, of course.)

[Guest realmayo]

The more I read the more I'm dreading the switch. Maybe Anki 2 is better than Anki 1 of a first-time user. But I'm concerned it's going to make me change the way I use my decks at the moment, and I've already got comfortable with using them in a certain, hassle-free, customised, way.

[Guest realmayo]

.. plus looking at the long list of changes to versions 2.02 and 2.03 I think I'll wait as long as I can while all the mistakes are corrected.

[dnevets]

Yep, I'm waiting as long as possible too. No Chinese toolkit for rapid creation of new cards + no hanzistats to help monitor progress = a very limited Anki.

If necessary I'll stay with Anki 1 and just not use it online; I can manually move cards/decks/stats between phone and laptop when necessary.

[waldeswind]

My first impression is totally bad. I installed the Anki 2 yesterday, spent about two hours trying to figure out how it works (yes, I know, I am an IT idiot) and when my deck was finished, I couln´t start studying it because it seemed to contain no cards. I scratched my head over it only to find, couple of hours later, that the cards mysteriously appeared in a different deck.

Using Anki is really an unpleasant experience for someone lazy to think, short of time or IT illiterate. If you are one of them, thoughts already quoted, like: "this programme is just for IT nerds" will inevitably pop up in your head. But perhaps in these days, IT idiots must try hard to get some computer literacy or die out ...

[Manuel]

Guys just get the old version. The SRS algo may have been slightly improved since then but it'll still work fine in most cases. I am sure the developer will sooner or later realise the v2 GUI needs some serious work (which in fairness had already been done in v1), and then we can all jump on the v2 wagon. I am off to get some pizza.

[Erbse]

Just upgraded to ANKI 2 on my android phone and all my decks seem to be gone

Where can I find them including my progress on them?

Now I try to download a new hsk deck, but each time I get a message that the file is broken.

I used Anki for such a long time, but version 2 gives me so much trouble. How can I downgrade to the old version?

edit:

it seems I cannot add any deck at all. Whatever deck I download, each time it tells me the apkg is not valid. I want to learn my vocab

edit2: deleted Anki, installed AnyMemo.

[hackinger]

Hi,

I am using Anki happily on my iPhone 4 with the "Mastering Chinese Characters" decks. I had decided not to upgrade to Version 2, but one day I pressed the update button in the App store by mistake and afterwards all my decks seemed to be gone. However the upgrade instructions on the Anki website are very well written and I could still transfer the decks to my pc, upgrade the decks there and move them back to the iPhone. Everything worked fine and I did not lose any information. A slight inconvenience, however it makes sense to not include the upgrade function in the iPhone version to keep it lean.

(@waldeswind: I work in the IT field and I appreciate that we are indispensable. )

Thus far I found only one bug, not a serious one, with the iPhone version. (I will report it in the Anki forum. The old version also had some bugs btw.) Version 2 of the app is faster and looks a bit nicer than the previous version. It has also more configuration options, but I did not really use them yet.

Cheers

hackinger

[grawrt]

Finally updated to Anki 2 on my phone (Droid Charge) I didnt see any problems with glitching and my decks messing up although I hadn't realy personalized it much (Made the silly mistake of upgrading my computer when anki2 wasnt available for my phone and wasted too much time making a deck for anki2 that I didnt bother making it again for anki 1).

I never really used anki so much before but I started to and I actually really like the interface of the phone. It looks a lot cleaner.

[gougou]

My phone automatically upgraded a few days ago, so I had to follow suit on the PC. It took me a while to figure out the deck conversion and everything, but now that that is done I have no complaints - and, like grawrt, I quite like the new interface.

Of course, I'm certainly not as sophisticated an Anki user as others here, but I do not regret making the switch.

[Olle Linge]

So, what's the current status on Chinese support? I'm talking about things like auto-completion for Pinyin (with colours) and definitions from dictionaries and so on?

[gougou]

Pinyin Toolkit is no longer compatible, but most of its features have been ported to the new plugin "Chinese support". You can get it here. There's also a discussion thread in Google groups somewhere over what features are still missing, but I can't find that one right now.

[Olle Linge]

Pinyin Toolkit is no longer compatible, but most of its features have been ported to the new plugin "Chinese support". You can get it here. There's also a discussion thread in Google groups somewhere over what features are still missing, but I can't find that one right now.

That looks fairly solid, actually. I'm not too concerned about all the functions, I basically just want to make sure that I can keep my card structure and that the colours work, functions that seem to be implemented already. I think I might try to switch as soon as I've handed in the last of the papers for this semester. Thanks for the info and the link!

[Lanchong]

Snigel: I've had a play and the pinyin auto-complete doesn't work for sentences. The colours work but you'll have to input the pinyin yourself for the moment.

[Olle Linge]

Snigel: I've had a play and the pinyin auto-complete doesn't work for sentences. The colours work but you'll have to input the pinyin yourself for the moment.

Oh, I see. Hm. This means that right now, entering sentences is a bit of a pain, because either you need a good input method for Pinyin with tone marks or you need to go through external software, right? I've installed Anki 2 already to check it out and share my decks online to make sure that stuff works before they shut down the old server (early February, I think). Everything seems okay so far, I just haven't used it much.

I normally use the desktop version to manipulate/add cards and my phone to review, so I'm afraid I have to upgrade once the server goes down anyway. It will be too tedious to manually shuffle the deck between the phone and the desktop client. I'll just have to find out a quick way of generating Pinyin for sentences. Thanks for letting me know!

[Manuel]

Google translate is quite good at that generating pinyin from whole Chinese text, then copy and paste into Anki.

[Olle Linge]

Google translate is quite good at that generating pinyin from whole Chinese text, then copy and paste into Anki.

That's my default option, yes. It works if I add the sentences in bulk (which I tend to do anyway), because it would be too tedious to have open a new tab, go to the site, enter the characters, get the pinyin, go back to Anki, paste and so on. Simply flipping between tabs copying and pasting would be fairly quick.

Even though this is perhaps acceptable, it isn't very good.