g-bod Diglot Senior Member United KingdomRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5974 days ago 1485 posts - 2002 votes Speaks: English*, Japanese Studies: French, German
| Message 177 of 436 23 April 2013 at 1:50am | IP Logged |
No, it turns out I'm not doing it wrong and the new Anki *is* buggy, at least as far as Japanese input is concerned. https://groups.google.com/forum/m/?fromgroups#!topic/ankisrs /LwGaZq67Svk
I'm so angry right now I can't even sleep. I was so pleased with myself for getting up to date with my deck and was feeling freshly motivated to work on Japanese again, only to find that my efforts as far as Anki is concerned were worthless.
Well screw you Anki 2.
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Evita Tetraglot Senior Member Latvia learnlatvian.info Joined 6544 days ago 734 posts - 1036 votes Speaks: Latvian*, English, German, Russian Studies: Korean, Finnish
| Message 178 of 436 23 April 2013 at 9:51am | IP Logged |
g-bod wrote:
Is it just me, or does Anki 2 just suck? I'm trying to add some cards to my kanji deck, first time doing Japanese on it since upgrading, and it's not going smoothly. As soon as I convert what I've typed into kanji with Windows IME, the cursor just disappears, which is really fiddly because I then have to use the mouse to highlight things to change the formatting. And then when I've added the card, rather than the cursor reappearing in the top box for me to add the next one, it disappears and I have to tab three or four times before typing all over again. And it no longer remembers which language you were using for each field, so I have to keep switching between English/Japanese (which was an annoyance for adding German cards too). Never mind the fact that the text boxes in the data input window are so small, and I can't seem to change them or the font size of what goes in them. |
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That thing with the cursor disappearing happens with Korean too. Usually I can get by without it, and when I want to get it back I open a different program and then go back to Anki (press Alt+TAB twice), that makes the cursor reappear. However, it reappears by itself every time I hit Ctrl+Enter to add a new card, and it focuses on the right (first) field. Maybe it's because I usually have the keyboard switched to the Latin alphabet when I do that.
The fact that Anki doesn't remember input settings for individual fields anymore is an annoyance as well but I've learned to live with it. The right Alt key is my best friend. I use the synchronization feature of Anki extensively so there's no choice for me but to use Anki 2. I also find the new learning mode very useful so overall I'm happy. I can understand your frustration though, it seems the problems with Japanese input are greater than with Korean input. On the other hand, Anki was originally created specifically to study Japanese so it seems strange that the author hasn't paid enough attention to these issues. If you go to the shared decks page you'll see that Japanese easily has the largest collection out of all the topics. Weird.
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dampingwire Bilingual Triglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4657 days ago 1185 posts - 1513 votes Speaks: English*, Italian*, French Studies: Japanese
| Message 179 of 436 23 April 2013 at 1:15pm | IP Logged |
If it's annoyed you that severely can't you export your current cards and re-import them
in Anki 1?
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g-bod Diglot Senior Member United KingdomRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5974 days ago 1485 posts - 2002 votes Speaks: English*, Japanese Studies: French, German
| Message 180 of 436 23 April 2013 at 3:14pm | IP Logged |
Evita, thanks for the feedback. Glad it's not just me, but I am disappointed. Maybe he should rename the thing Memory, to emphasise the change in priority. The thing is under version 1.2.8 it already took me around an hour to input just one chapter of KiC. This thing has 143 chapters in total (of which I'd done 23) so the extra burden of additional keystrokes plus more chances to make an error has just tipped the scales a bit too much in terms of the data entry burden of the method I was using. I can't deny it was effective, but the way things have gone it's now just too much.
Dampingwire, you're right I could attempt to import back to version 1.2.8 but since it's no longer officially supported it's not a long term solution.
Well, I kind of surprised myself at how angry I felt about the whole thing last night. I'm not going to lose any more sleep over it. There are other ways to learn a language, after all.
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kraemder Senior Member United StatesRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5176 days ago 1497 posts - 1648 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German, Spanish, Japanese
| Message 181 of 436 23 April 2013 at 5:18pm | IP Logged |
I got really upset with my srs program and author back when I found
a bug that had a pretty big impact on my studying. I assume it's
because we put so much effort into studying that we can get pretty
upset. I don't know if you'd like my flashcard app as an alternative. It
doesn't do the automatic input switching that you're describing so I
have to hit alt ~ to switch between English and Japanese. And I
setup the flashcards using a spreadsheet program since the author
doesn't have a native pc interface setup. I like it though but maybe
I'm deprived heh. It's called flashcards Deluxe if you check it out on
app store or play store.
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g-bod Diglot Senior Member United KingdomRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5974 days ago 1485 posts - 2002 votes Speaks: English*, Japanese Studies: French, German
| Message 182 of 436 23 April 2013 at 6:45pm | IP Logged |
Yeah I guess I was ready to ride a fresh new wave of motivation but got cut down prematurely. A lot of emotion is wrapped up in all that!
Anki is effective, demanding and free. I've invested a lot of time and effort in studying with it, but ultimately the author doesn't owe me a thing. And it's not as if I'm about to put the hours in to code my own SRS system!
Shame though.
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Evita Tetraglot Senior Member Latvia learnlatvian.info Joined 6544 days ago 734 posts - 1036 votes Speaks: Latvian*, English, German, Russian Studies: Korean, Finnish
| Message 183 of 436 23 April 2013 at 11:20pm | IP Logged |
kraemder makes a good point. If your main issue with Anki is how the notes are entered then you can try using other programs to prepare your notes and then import them into Anki. I don't have any experience with that myself but I know it's available, it should be described in the manual. Don't get me wrong, I don't want to pressure you to use Anki, I would just hate it if you stopped using it because of a problem that was solvable. I hope you can figure it out.
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stifa Triglot Senior Member Norway lang-8.com/448715 Joined 4865 days ago 629 posts - 813 votes Speaks: Norwegian*, EnglishC2, German Studies: Japanese, Spanish
| Message 184 of 436 23 April 2013 at 11:29pm | IP Logged |
I use excel for "mass" imports.
Each column represent a field and each row represent a card.
After you've done amassing new cards, select all fields you used and copy them over to
notepad (should automatically be separated by tabs.
Then, save the notepad file as a CSV file with UTF-8 encoding.
Finally, import the file (with the new cards) to Anki. :)
(I assume computers running Linux, OS-X, etc. have "equivalent" software.)
My biggest pet peeve with Anki 2 got to be that you paste formatted text into it, and
the "de-formatting" is very clunky and annoying.
Edited by stifa on 23 April 2013 at 11:31pm
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