Anki and Japanese self-study resources

renkotsuban · January 23, 2025, 8:45am

ALSO I highly recommend going to Google Image Search (or whatever your search engine of choice is these days) and pasting in images to your Anki cards if that helps you remember stuff lol. I have no idea what is “Japanese mustard spinach” but I do know that when I go to the supermarket and see this veggie I know oh okay, this is 小松菜, gotcha

Also PS you can use the “optional recall” feature of Anki to easily make the reverse card (i.e. a card showing the pic and asking you what’s the Japanese name):

dismallyOriented · January 23, 2025, 9:04am

[Points at vegetable] I KNOW THAT GUY. I may be mistaking it for 油菜 in chinese though? But I know him he’s tasty as hell

renkotsuban · January 23, 2025, 9:06am

Friend to all hot pots and stir fries, excellent for pickling, even pretty okay eaten raw. I love this so much bahahaha

maja · January 23, 2025, 11:31am

These examples look great! I put Ankidroid on my phone and grabbed a random Genki kanji deck to try things out, and I actually love having this on my phone I can’t believe I never looked up Anki phone options before because having a revision tool on the go whenever I have restless hands on work breaks or in public transit is amazing. Didn’t like how this shared deck formats the cards though, so I’m gonna force myself to sit down and edit/sort out some decks on my own because this has actually gotten me pretty excited to practice.

renkotsuban · January 24, 2025, 5:20am

That’s great! And yeah, Anki is PERFECT for public transit ahaha, it kept my company during the long train rides when I was teaching in downtown Tokyo. I really recommend turning on the gestures feature to make it very quick to swipe through cards one-handed (very handy when you are on packed buses/trains).

TrashboatDaGod · January 29, 2025, 9:03pm

I just had the idea to convert the first post here into a word doc i can give out. I started hosting japanese study sessions/lessons at the library, and this would be a good overview type thing to help folks figure out a path for self study.

TrashboatDaGod · February 1, 2025, 4:44pm

I have a question about anki.

Is it possible to have a cardnformat where i can givemyself a little hint before revealing the answer? Im adding radical practice to my decks and i wanted to be able to reveal my nmemonic device b4 getting the full answer.

coffeentacos · February 2, 2025, 1:55am

Looks like yes: https://youtu.be/Hv0IxQSYZiM

renkotsuban · February 2, 2025, 4:46am

Oh that’s a cool idea about making flyers to hand out at study sessions!

And yep, since Anki cards are basically little webpages, you can add hints with CSS/Javascript:

https://chrisk91.me/post/2018-04-28-Adding-Hint-fields-in-Anki/

Also, if anyone is looking for a JP-JP dictionary, I recently got the Obunsha 標準国語辞典 (Standard Japanese Dictionary). It was around 3000yen (so I guess ~20USD? god that conversion rate) and it comes with a serial code that I can enter into the Obunsha app on my phone to get the digital version as well:

Not a bad deal honestly. You can also just buy the digital version of the dictionary within the app itself. I like this dictionary because you can blow the text up huge and it also links to related entries.