I absolutely love technology and how you can increase efficiency by combining everything together. I’m all about avoiding manually clicking, pasting 5 billion times!! My main motivation for posting this is to spread the word about autohotkey which enables me to break from using anki 2.0 for reviewing mandarin on anki (I use both anki 2.1 and anki 2.0 to use the plugins). I was really attached to anki 2.0 because of wordquery since it doesn’t work on anki 2.1 even with fastwordquery – the dictionaries just DO NOT show up. So I tried to see if stardict is usable and it is once I change the font which is an impossible feat for goldendict (don’t need ya anyway) and i know from past experience that autohotkey makes everything more convenient, useful, efficient. The end result of combining autohotkey and stardict is comparable or better than wordquery so I made the transition to anki 2.1 for anki minus search cards by length plugin on anki 2.0. Morphman and mandarin is a pretty sick combo since there’s no conjugations in mandarin. I never used morphman/subs2srs for korean/japanese because my korean/japanese were already too good to use those tools when i found out about them lol… it’d be ridiculously time-sucking for very little benefit. i don’t need audio and i don’t have time for anki cards with audio. I do use the MASS TAGGER function of morphman for Korean because I have A LOT OF cards dumped into anki from HUGE tables from a japanese site and dictionaries with example sentences etc etc … that aspect of morphman is worth it for korean. I can easily curate or segregate the potentially useful cards from the useless cards.
programs:
lingoes dictionary – the off-line pop-up dictionary that works on double click works well since the add pinyin on top of hanzi inserts spaces between the words. of course the parsing isn’t 100% accurate but it’s pretty damn good. From my experience it’s like 95%? accurate so it makes lingoes pop-up dictionary very very useful like hanjaro (hanjaro is not 90-95 % accurate though haha ). I made an autohotkey to double click when i press insert. i also set it so that lingoes looks up the words that are highlighted. as much as i love pinyin helper’s definition table… scrolling and pressing page down and end is kinda annoying . I’d say 98% of the time i use lingoes and have no use for the definition table. also since i’m using morphman and seeing it i+1 stuff most of the time i rely on lingoes over the pinyin helper definition table since i usually just need to look up 1 word. sometimes the definition table has it and lingoes doesn’t so i love having options. i think the biggest dictionary on lingoes is the naver c-k one. lingoes has J/K/E dictionaries for mandarin!
stardict dictionary – dictionaries are a must because even though the pinyin helper anki addon generates the english definitions sometimes I want a MORE detailed explanation (it makes it easier to remember/understand the word) or another explanation or a dictionary example sentence or hear it from a japanese/korean point of view. in general korean/japanese dictionaries are more useful than english dictionaries… which makes sense since those languages are closer to chinese than english. Dictionaries also come in handy when the pinyin helper doesn’t parse correctly which is a rare occurrence.
stardict/goldendict has a pop-updictionary function but i don’t care for it because it doesn’t let me change the font-size/window color etc so it’s just unusable for me. luckily i have autohotkey!
hmm i think all in all i like the fonts 何尼玛-细体 常规 and .黒体-日本語 because they’re very readable. plus it’s distinct and clear in one glance as to what’s korean, japanese, mandarin. the font in the screenshot is noto sans and i now have the font set as 黒体-日本語 which is so much better. the kanji in noto sans f’ed up in stardict!! it inserts some hanzi instead of kanji sometimes which i guess is more hanzi-reading-familiarizing practice but that’s NOT Japanese.
deepL – amazing pop-up dictionary. Can’t believe it’s free amazing! it makes mandarin subs2srs cards so much more useful since the problem is I know some/most/all the characters in the sentence but i have no idea wtf it means. it’s all about comprehensible input NOT incomprehensible input which is a legit waste of time. deepl is like a must in my eyes lol.
anki plugins:
advanced copy fields
I use this for swapping fields, copying fields etc. on a related note i use [ a-zA_Z}[a-zA-Z0-9]* and [\u4e00-\u9fa5]* for getting rid of english text/mandarin text respectively. you have check or uncheck regular expression to make it work.
morphman
definitely worth tinkering with the settings by following mattvsjapan’s guide like what’s considered too short and too long, what’s considered mature, css on the unknown morphs (I made them huge and bold lol) etc. i had to change the config.py so that it does not skip morphs i saw that day since just changing it in the options didn’t do shit. I also made an external.db and dumped into hsk1-2 stuff so i don’t have to see shit like wo shi sensei. i tag and suspend cards that are tagged MM_toolong because morphman still shows them sometimes and it’s infuriating… Actually I prefer using search cards by length on anki 2.0 for suspending. most of the times if it’s over 12 characters it’s just way too hard and not ideal. it makes more sense to expose myself to a shitton load of sentences that are 5-9 characters long etc since i have a fighting chance of comprehending them. I use autohotkey to save words to a .txt and then i paste those words on top of the frequency.txt. My other option is to use MASS TAGGER feature of morphman to tag the cards that contain the words in the pinyin field that was generated using pinyin helper since the parser is pretty good. this only works if you change the morhpman cardtype to SPACED LANGUAGES. I only do the frequency.txt thing nowadays! The other thing I figured out is that you can search the field that contains the definitions generated by pinyin helper to gather similar cards like if I search the word idiom I can gather up all the cards that contain an idiom. The idiom cards that are tagged 0.5t are very useful!
multi-column note editor
set font size
default font is too small on anki ui
quick field navigation
I use this plugin to save time and it enables the authotkey scripts to work. technically you could still get the scripts to work by sending tab a bunch of times instead of sending control 6 or whatever field it is
tagger toggler fork
this one can be very useful because you can easily tag cards during initial reviews. I either tag the card with something, suspend the card, delete the card, or mark the card by pressing asterisk. i’m still experimenting around to see what tags are most useful i have stuff like “cute” “funny” ” dramatic” “easy-to-remember-tones” (when the tone repeats like 22 or 44) “grammar” “vocab” “zze” (for easy cards that are mm_already) “4-ji” for words that are at least 4 chararcters long that don’t have “iidiom” in the definition generated by pinyin helper, “ssimliar-sounds” – if the sounds that sound the same appear in succession in the sentence (if you watch the youtube video about z/c/j/ch etc etc you’re like they sound totally different or a little different then you hear shit at native speed and then you’re like yep i’m back at square one. can’t really force your ears/brains to be woke). the plugin can also TAG AND suspend the card if you want and I definitely do that for cards that are too easy or too hard or the audio is f
‘ed up etc. lol i found a nasty, random example from subs2srs that i tagged as easy-to-remember-tones:
✎ 它们会用大便攻击
它们会用大便攻击
♥
☂ Those throw poop at you.. 4 4 4 4 | 11 .
here’s a more normal sentence:
✎ 逃到书桌后面去
逃到书桌后面去
♥
☂ Get behind that bookshelf! 11 | 444
I get amazed when i find sentences where the 4th tone is in succession 6 times in a row
i definitely love my deck that i made outta the cards tagged tones-easy-to-remember. i notice the crap out of the tones of words since the tones are in succession.
I got an idea to also try the tag hhard-unique for words with hanzi that i don’t know and tag ppayAttention for words that seem easy but the meaning isn’t what i expect/predict which is all i do since mandarin is written in chinese chracters and i know japanese ( can’t really turn it off!) . Also I’ve been trying exists-in-japanese tag for words that exist in japanese and means the same thing ( if it means something different i’d tag ppayattention) which means all i have to focus on i remembering the pinyin and the tone instead of glazing over it. i still use vvocab for words that are kinda easy that don’t fit in with any of these tags.
haven’t been really stressing out about tones. i figured learning by association would be as effortless at it comes?? i see no point in trying to memorize or notice or remember tones during subs2srs reviews/inital views since i’m not going to remember it anyway. i just focus on comprehending the card or increasing my comprehension of my card… reading the pinyin and accent marks carefully is a futile exercise… you can’t expect yourself to remember/memorize something in the first encounter.. maybe after 20th encounter or 100th encounter? it depends on the word. i’m assuming like japanese shit will sound like what it sounds like because they say it the same way 5 billion times as i get my exposure( In this case condensed audio/subs2srs). i’m sure laid back is fine for really common words but it’ll probably require more effort less common words. i’m not interested in output anyway so it’s not a big deal to me. also i can’t type pinyin because i don’t know pinyin… i refuse to memorize/study it lol. I will learn the sounds first and some words so that i have less issues with pinyin cognitive dissonance. pinyin definitely deepened my love for hangeul ! i think i saw yoyo chinese’s video on tones and pinyin a year or two or three ago and i don’t wanna re-watch it or watch other teach chinese youtube vids at this point in time. Also I never got the hype around coloring pinyin for tones… my anki is black and white for good reason. COLOR doesn’t help me.. it’s like expecting to have mastered korean spacing rules from just reading and watching tv ( which does not work since I’m just reading to comprehend and not to memorize how they spaced the words )
speed focus mode auto-alert auto-reveal
I use this plugin to use subs2srs cards like comprehensible input lol. i have reviews set to zero save for a couple curated decks and those are capped low too lol. i mostly see new cards because that’s what i wanna do. Not so sure if such a strategy would work if you only know English. I set it so that it shows the answer after 1 second so i can just grade the card instead of pressing enter then the grade. I also paste the {Audio} 20 times so i don’t have to press R to repeat the audio. i’m still trying to figure out exactly how i want to make subs2srs cards work for me. it makes anki more effortless since those enter button pushes add up. Technically I’m still getting spaced repetition since stuff still repeats (grammar/vocab/whatever patterns) even if 99% of the cards I see are new cards rather than reviews. I’d rather see 20-30 cards with the word I want to learn than one card 20-30 times with the default the anki settings… it’s just more effective. Speaking of which my lax settings are even more lax for mandarin.. it’s like 9 days 10days 15 days and minium interval of 7 days ? I feel like if you can’t learn the card with a minimum interval of 7days, the card shouldn’t even be in anki… thinking in terms of efficiency. I’m thinking the settings should be even more lax since these are subs2srs cards with audio and all that. I tag like crazy while seeing them so I can curate them later
zoom 21
chinese companion -frequency sort hsk suspend
Pinyin on top of Hanzi – holy crap this one’s amazing. it adds pinyin AND the definitions FOR EVERY SINGLE WORD IN THE SENTENCE! I don’t know of any plugin that does anything like this for other languages. it literally only works because of the writing system! mandarin is a really convenient language to learn when you have technology on your side! the parser is pretty good but when it fails i just use deepl/stardict/lingoes/naverline site etc using AUTHOTKEY. in the anki UI it calls itself pinyin helper but it’s so much more than just pinyin since it can parse and generate definitions. ONLY DOWNSIDE is that it DOES NOT WORK on traditional characters which is a non-issue for me 🙂 and another downside is the fact that it looks up every single word in the sentence which just adds to scrolling aggravation etc so I absolutely recommend pairing THIS plugin with lingoes pop-up dictionary! i usually don’t need to scroll becuase lingoes works.
search card by length – only anki 2.0 – i still use this in conjunction with anki 2.1 so i can suspend long cards. i search min : 12 etc then tag it as llong and then suspend. suspending cards tagged mm_toolong by morphman doesn’t always catch all the long cards for whatever reason…
https://dict.naver.com/linedict/zhendict/#/cnen/example?query=%E9%A5%BC%E5%B9%B2
other premade audio decks i use besides subs2srs include counters, hsk 1-6 ( it has the word and the sentence), immersive chinese, zhongwen redgreenblue, free blueprint mandarin deck, hsk1-6 grammar deck, measure word, spoonfed, mandarinmania, tatoeba, japanes-chinese sentence thing. i only use decks with sentences because isolated words do nothing for me since i can’t make myself associate arbitrary info with arbitrary info. at first i capped the reviews to a really low number like 2 or 5 than i capped the reviews to ZERO but it still worked out since there’s overlap among the decks. anyways it was either i cap the reviews to zero or not do them at all so that’s what i did. now i have the decks capped low instead of zero but i don’t necessarily do them everyday lol.
<- english and korean is shit since they’re both from google translate. thank god deepl exists!! the korean translation is hilarious. kinda surprised the c->english translation beat the c->korean google translation. now that i think about it maybe papago’s c->k translation is good haha. i gotta test it out. k translation says “the friends you have bought peter.” jeez it makes this kid’s anime so dark. this anime is dark but it’s not that dark. the original japanese line is useless af for understanding this mandarin dialogue since that is the point of dubs (turn it into mandarinnnnnnn so people don’t have to read subtitles).. hmmm maybe the line before/after that line coincides with the dub dialogue. but no matter, this sentence is easy now.
Authotkey
2.1-deepl-stardict.ahk
anki-asterisk.ahk
anki-browser-frontfront.ahk
anki-delete.ahk
anki-editor-frontfront.ahk
anki-front.ahk
close-EDITOR.ahk
deepL-from-anki-editor.ahk
deepl-paste-5TH.ahk
f5-lingoes-paste-F6.ahk
f5-stardict-paste.ahk
grammar-tag-deck-move.ahk
ifFAIL-f2.ahk
open-acitivate-DEEPL.ahk
search-browse-grammar.ahk
stardict-front.ahk
vocab-tag-deck-move.ahk
-=-=
i use alotta authotkey, and these are the ones i use with mandarin subs2srs dekcs.
- if you install authotkey and run all these scripts chances are some of them won’t work since i set it up for my computer/anki but learning about autohotkey isn’t hard just google or bug people on the forums. i still share them because it’s helpful to learn from examples. it’s easy to modify the scripts to make it work for you.
I highly recommend getting a gaming mouse with extra buttons if you use autohotkey that way you don’t have to remember the keyboard shortcuts. I wish i was a gamer so i could have found out about gaming mouses sooner lol.
2.1-deepl-stardict.ahk
when i press f5:
if text is highlighted on anki, the autohotkey script pastes the highlighted text in field 9 of my card then looks up the word on lingoes and stardict. i came up with script because the wordquery plugin was the only reason i wanted to do subs2srs reviews on anki 2.0. now i’m all in for anki 2.1 minus search card by length plugin which i don’t need during reviews/initial view.
if text is not highlighted, it runs text in field 1 on anki through deepl. field 1 is the hanzi expression field. deepl is like a must-have for me since the problem is i know what some/most/all the characters means but i have no f’in idea what the sentence means or i’m pretty damn sure i’m missing nuance and not getting the point of the sentence.
- i have deepl set as control +c, control + h
the gif below shows wordquery addon at work to generate definitions from dictionaries with the help of authotkey: I don’t use it for mandarin subs2srs anymore since I figured out how to use stardict/lingoes with autohotkey. still use it for korean cards of course since you can batch in the browse window. I technically set up the autohotkey script to paste the word into the field before looking up stuff so I could batchrun for Chinese cards if I wanna
my cards don’t look fugly like this anymore lol.
dubs are definitely more fun and useful for me as a beginner? intermediate? especially the american movies. they tend to talk more slow and clear and exaggerated. to me in terms of usefulness it’s dubs > talk/variety shows like the chinese version of produce 101 > anime dub > chinese dramas. I’m sure it will change as my passive mandarin ability/vocab grows. i remember i came across some card from a chinese drama and the person was saying something really simple and easy but i couldn’t hear it because they talked so fast even though i had the audio on auto-repeat… plus i’m pretty damn sure that if i was a chinese person who was fluent in mandarin I wouldn’t be watching chinese dramas anyway. kinda like i’m pretyty damn sure if i were a korean person fluent in korean i’d never watch korean dramas … there’s just so many other things i’d rather than watch a shitty korean soap opera lol. anyways i’d imagine that learning from drama in subs2srs is more fun than actually watching a drama i since i’ll never watch a chinese drama lol. but in all seriouness if i was fluent in korean/mandarin and knew no english i’d probably be watching american dramas with korean/mandarin subs if i didn’t learn english. and in all seriousness you dont have to watch a single second of dramas or wuxia etc to get good at mandarin.
anki-asterisk.ahk
if anki is the active window, when i press asterisk, it sends 2 after 200 miliseconds. if i am marking a card that usually means i want to see it again so i’d rather it just mark some answer and cut down on the keystrokes damnit
anki-browser-frontfront.ahk
when i press alt + b, it brings browser to the front
anki-delete.ahk
when anki is the active window, when i press delete, it sends control + D. on ank i2.1 they change delete to control + delete which is just a bitch
anki-editor-frontfront.ahk
when i press alt+ e it brings anki editor to the front
anki-front.ahk
when i press alt + a it brings anki to the front
close-EDITOR.ahk
when i press f12 if closes the anki editor and then activates anki screen
deepL-from-anki-editor.ahk
when i press f7 it runs highlighted text through through deepl. easier to press f7 than cotrol +c, control + h
deepl-paste-5TH.ahk
if deepl is the active window, when i scrolll the mouse DOWN it copies the text in the translation window and then pastes it in to the 5th field of editor. i leave deepl maximized so that the coordinates work everytime.
f5-lingoes-paste-F6.ahk
if lingoes is the active window, when I press f5 on lingoes it pastes copied text onto the 6th field anki. for some reason i can’t get control + c to work so i do control + c then press f5
f5-stardict-paste.ahk
if stardict is the active window, if i press f5 it copies and pastes the highlighted text into the 6th field of anki. i have one of the buttons on the gaming mouse set to f5 so i click on the mouse buttons
ifFAIL-f2.ahk
if deepl is the active window, when i scroll the mousewheel up it runs deepl again on field 1 on anki. i made this because sometimes the first script above doesn’t work or rather deepl failed me.
open-acitivate-DEEPL.ahk
when i press alt + d it brings deepl to the front. also it checks to see if deepl is open; if deepl is not running it opens deepl
stardict-front.ahk
when i press alt + s it brings stardict to the front. I ‘m gonna change this to the windows key which is # for authotkey
sendtostardict.ahk
when i press control + alt + s- it sends highlighted text to stardict
sendtolingies
copies and sends highlighted text to linges. i have this in the startup folder of my windows computer .
vocab-tag-deck-move.ahk
search-browse-grammar.ahk
grammar-tag-deck-move.ahk
these are authotkeys for searching highlighted text in the review window in the anki browser and tagging them. i have to keep the browser maximized because coordinates are involved. i don’t use these scripts much because i have morphman, mass tagger feature of morphman, frequencylist.txt etc etc but it’s definitely useful if you want to see examples of the exact same phrase/sentence pattern. I also instead do search with Expression:( *phrase* or *phrase*) to do multiple searches at once so I can tag them, move them into a deck and re-sort using the hsk sort plugin so I could see multiple example sentences with the phrase
recently I even made ahk to send 2 to anki after I press my tag toggler shortcuts so I can spare myself a lotta keystrokes.
So when I first come across my 1T mm_frequency cards my options are to hover over the word and press insert to bring up the lingoes pop-up dictionary, press LEFT arrow to run deepL on the first field, highlight the word then press the shortcut to look up the word on stardict/lingoes, press windows button + c to look up the word/phrase/grammar etc on naver linedict, or press down/page-up/down/end to see the definitions generated by pinyin helper, and to press a tag toggler shortcut and grade the card if i understand the card fine with the english translation and the hanzi. I mostly do deepl/lingoes-pop-up but i definitely use my options. i use the naver linedict the least because usually the other stuff is enough. I also heard of people doing anki reviews on the browser to use zhonwen pop-up dictionary so they can just hover the word but i have too many cards to be uploading it to ankiweb. Also I hate how ankiweb doesn’t automatically play the audio. also i like tagging the new cards during the initial encounter
I’m not gonna write extensively about how to subs2srs mandarin and all that bs but i didn’t just jump into subs2srs decks with my japanese kanji knowledge and trudged on. it’s the opposite. Even if I have a million subs2srs cards and morphman and I am super literate in Japanese I can’t just jump into mandarin on anki because i don’t know any mandarin grammar and i can’t hear mandarin. I was not qualified to learn from subs2srs on anki… like the saying that it’s possible to know all the words in the sentence and not understand the sentence, it is POSSIBLE to know all the characters in the sentence and not understand the sentence. Deepl is my savior lol. Of course deepl fails me at time but it’s still helpful a majority of the time. in my experience korean and japanese are more similar than mandarin/japanese or mandarin/korean so mandarin is hard for me. Anyways, if you can’t hear mandarin even if the sentence on anki is short and audio repeats the audio 20 times, you still can’t hear it! there’s at least 5 sounds that sound exactly the same and the tones are impossible to hear when people speak at natural speed when you’re a complete beginner with virgin ears. so I did some grammar cards, and other wonderful premade cards halfassedly as halfassedly as possible ( set huge intervals, cap the reviews to 0, do it very sporadically and inconsistently. Chinese grammar isn’t rocket science at least for beginner/intermediate stuff so default anki settings aren’t needed… actually they’re never needed. there are more important things in my life not to mention fucking covid) and I listened to condensed audio of code geass (it’s the most fun thing I could think of to listen to in mandarin and C.c.’s voice DOES sound like the japanaese counterpart which is impressive. The French dub doesn’t even try… cc just sounds like some random French woman. Omg I heard some of the mandarin voices for season 2 and the Chinese dub definitely tries to make the voices similar to the Japanese voice actors which is REALLY appreciate.. it was very noticeable with the bald? Chinese character with the unique, annoying voice) and some other crap when I felt like it. Like most good anime, i love the background music and sound effects and it makes condensed audio more entertaining and useful. I didn’t do anything hardcore because there’s no rush. i’m all about the cardinal rules of AJATT which is to have fun and to do SOMETHING than NOTHING. on a random note, I read somewhere on japanese google that japanese literacy gives you 1000 hanzi for free ~
links:
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hmm I actually made subs2srs decks that only contain cards that are 2 characters long, 3 chacratser long, 4 charactesr long, etc up to 7 characters. this is something that you can only really do with mandarin because they only write in hanzi! those decks are pretty cool and useful since the BEST cards to learn from are SHORT and comprehensible (they usually are since they’re short and i have my english translation and DEEPL). not to mention I ran morphman and suspended comprehension cards, have a frequency.txt ( i paste stuff i collected via gaming mouse + ahk + subs2srs reviews on the top of it) etc so all i get is USEFUL SHORT cards which are extremely desirable characteristics for subs2srs cards. if you don’t run subs2srs you’re gonna get a lotta useless shit like people yelling people’s names or whatever bs phrase or variation of that bs phrase you already know and heard 5 billion times.
