Producing Anki decks on the basis of existing materials

TODO

Over the years I’ve created several decks on the basis of existing Anki-external, non machine-readable materials; the most recent of which are reposited here.

Here are some advices for anyone who wishes to produce substantial Anki decks from such materials.

1. Plan ahead

If the source material is massive, it’s better to think well ahead how you want to make cards out of it. Some materials lend themselves more readily to such kind of formalisation then others, naturally.

Questions to consider:

• What kind of information do you want to capture?
• Is it all of a single kind? Several kinds? Should they be unified or kept apart?
• What is essential to include and what is superfluous?
• What fields should the note typeIf you are not familiar with note types, see below. have?
• Is the information from the source material convertible to the chosen form easily (e.g. example sentences and vocabulary) or does it require active interpretation and formalisation on your part for each and every item? The former is easy, but the latter requires you to think of a system to devise and employ in order to make things as consistent as possible and to minimise toil.

Refer to the classic piece, Effective learning: Twenty rules of formulating knowledge, for further general guidance.

2. Familiarise yourself with Anki

I’ve seen many shared decks that were obviously made by people who use Anki in a… suboptimal way. Most common is the use of two fields (‘front’ and ‘back’) to capture all information, as opposed to having each distinct kind of information in its own field and deriving cards (each with its own front and back side) from these fields. Read Anki’s manual, specifically the part about making your own note types, tailored to your needs. This does require learning some very basic HTML and CSS if you are not familiar with these languages already.

3. Input the data into a

- Don’t input the data directly to Anki. Make a database with external tools and formats (JSON, YAML, CSV, etc.) and then import them

See my [Y Geiriau Bach](https://app.radicle.xyz/nodes/seed.radicle.garden/rad:z2PAWAdhwvbpiYwm86bArS89NvhoK/tree/cym/ygb/README.md) deck for example.

TODO: Note type TODO: Load TODO: automatic verification; double check; OCR+typing => different types of mistakes TODO: cloze TODO: no AI. you want to learn real information. GIGO

TODO: old draft 👇

> Anyone else using #anki flashcards as a learning aid? What an incredible tool! I am building a #sanskrit learning program based off the. I think what I like most is it has limits (that you can change of course) and engineering such that you learn a lot without banging your head against hours and hours of labour. This makes the process actually pleasant. As a longtime #autodidactic #unschooler, I believe if learning is a drag most students will drop the subject matter.

Hi 👋

Yeah, Anki is great! I’ve been using it for years now and it helped me incredibly. [FSRS](https://docs.ankiweb.net/deck-options.html#fsrs) is a wonderful recent addition, which together with it’s support for [simple two-button binary feedback](https://ankiweb.net/shared/info/876946123) (fail=again and pass=good only) revolutionised the way I do my reviews: they are now much more effective both in how there is less load (the algorithm is demonstrably better in predicting when it’s best to show a card) and in the way my brain is at ease when I have to choose between two options (simple) and not four (analysis paralysis) for each and every card, hundreds a day.

I began writing a reply, and then realised it would be better to post on the web and then link it here, so here it is: TODO

Thanks, Dena, for mentioning me 🙂