Show HN: MDAnki – convert Markdown to Anki cards

I have been using Anki for Chinese with a premade deck (Spoonfed Chinese, if anyone is curious) for around 1.5 years and reviewing time has crept up too much. I have lowered the number of new cards per day several times (started at 20, now at 12, thinking about going to 10) but I am very averse to change the rest of the defaults since they are very technical things and it's hard for a layperson to know the optimal settings. I trust the Anki devs to have more data on, e.g., the typical rate at which we forget things than I, a random language learner, can have; what do I know about that? So I fear that changing something may harm my learning (currently I get more work than I would like, but I do learn).

You seem to know what you're talking about so I'll try your advice (thanks a lot for it!). But if any Anki dev is reading, please, pay attention to the defaults. I'm sure the overwhelming majority of users are going to use them, out of lack of information and/or fear of tweaking things that we don't know much about. It's a pity to have such an awesome software not live up to its potential due to bad defaults.

Would it be hard to ask the user a small questionnaire, like "how long are you planning to study this subject?", "do you have a specific goal (learning X cards by date Y)?" and "what is the average and maximum time you are willing to devote per day?", and use that to set reasonable options for that user?

If you hit "hard" on a card, and then months later it re-appears, at which point you now remember it well and hit "good", doesn't it reset the state of that card back to normal?

Everybody I would urge you to read this comment if you are an Anki user.

The point about Anki is not the sw but the intervals and if you haven't got them right, there's not much point.

I have found in the past that

(1) with sheer persistence, I busted through leeches. For instance 催促 used to be a leech, in a deck of cards where that is the front. Now I know the word so well I can recall it in the reverse direction: for instance to talk about how it used to be a leech. :)

(2) given enough time, cards you know well will turn into leeches, simply due to occasional gaffes. The conversion of a card to leech is based on an absolute count of how many times you got it wrong, ever, regardless of how many times in between you got it right.

http://www.kylheku.com/tankan/

It's a proprietary, closed-source program for Windows that runs as a web service on localhost, using your browser for UI.

It's specialized for learning Kanji meanings and readings, nothing else. You can't use it for Japanese vocab, you can't use it for Russian, or for memorizing capital cities or dog breeds.

It does one thing, and well.

> Going back and slogging through that backlog of ~400 reviews was very demotivating.

You will love Tankan if you try it, because in Tankan, you can easily test yourself on 400 Kanji in the space of some 15 minutes, and refresh your knowledge efficiently.

Tankan is not based on self-assessment ("do I know this card?"). It generates test sheets where you fill in answers for each Kanji. The machine decides if your answers are right or wrong, not you. The Kanji are all displayed in one page. You can read the next few kanji ahead while your fingers are answering the current one. You can tab quickly from one field to the next. If you don't remember something, you can skip it, and then backfill it before submitting the test for grading.

When the test is graded, you can then instantly take another test which just has the kanji that you got wrong. You can iterate on this until everything is right, and the the next batch of cards will be drawn from your deck.

When you know the material well, literally your typing speed is the critical factor. The problem with flashcard programs like Anki is that you're blocked from seeing the next card while on the current card. And even if you aren't, you're limited to seeing one at a time. Your brain needs to see a "sliding window" of multiple cards so it can think ahead.

For learning, Tankan has a rich selection method for kanji; by grade, frequency, stroke count, string search.

Large sets of kanji can be partitioned into sets labeled 0 through 9, A through F, which are selectable through checkboxes. So, say you want to learn some set of kanji according to some selection criteria, which happen to produce a set of 1000 kanji. What you can do is use the 16 subsets to divide it arbitrarily. Say, make a four week plan: This week you drill on sets 0+1 early in the week and 2+3 later in the week. Then the next week, 4+5 and 6+7, the over the remaining two weeks 8+9 and A+B, and C+D and E+F. Then, you start combining them.

Before long, you can casually take a test of all 1000, in one sitting. Bang away at the keyboard for half an hour. Have it graded. 92%, very good! That means 920 were right; only 80 are wrong: just a couple of minutes to re-test on those and after that round, maybe 7 will have to be done again in just seconds.

Tankan has a natural vacation mode: when you've drilled yourself, just put it away. Come back to it in weeks or months, fire up those 1000 kanji, slog through it, and you're back in the game before you know it.

Tankan also identifies which kanji you're confusing for one another. You can select those as a deck, and drill yourself on it. In this mode, the confused groups of kanji always appear together in the test. The groups themselves are mixed up relative to other groups, and the order is scrambled within the groups, but the confused kanji are always in successive runs. The relation is transitive. If you confuse A for B, and also C for B, then A-B-C are a confused set. You will be startled! If you're mixing up 住 and 注 主, it will know. If you're mixing up 姉 and 妹, it will know.

Tankan keeps no permanent record. Only the most 20 recent answers for any kanji are retained, and are not associated with any scheduled time, or time interval or anything. You must click a save button to explicitly checkpoint your state. When the program starts up, it doesn't automatically load the saved session state; if you want, you can ignore it and start in the initial game. It works exactly like checkpointing a game: re-start the saved game, or begin a new one.

There is none of that "Anki tyranny" ("OMG, my 3.5 year card lapsed to 1.0 years, waah!"). It doesn't take over your life in any way.

This helps less than you'd think. Many of my leeches are due to word similarities. Sometimes I'd have an issue of erroneously swapping two similar words, and my brain would get "stuck" following that circuit. If that makes sense?

The fix that I found was suspending one or both of the words and making up a lot of sentences for them. And physically writing them.

8 strikes and you don't have to learn it!

Edit: I was unfair. Just tested in Chrome Android and it worked fine, and Firefox Android and it worked mostly fine with some minor bugs (mainly clicking on menu icon does a text selection). The complete failure was in Firefox Previous, which is incomplete and completely reasonable not to test with.