Quite some Anki fans wonder why Anki is not well-known. Using Anki changed the life of more people than I can count, and they wonder why there are not more people using it; or at least why it is not well-known. I'll try to answer to the best of my ability. I should not however that, it's a question on a negative, so I can only offers educated guesses. "Educated" because I've been active in Anki ecosystem since 2017, but "guess" because it's pretty hard to answer a question on a negative and this is hardly a question for a software developer.
Anki
Using Anki while driving
Don't review while driving
I don't believe I have to state it's a horrible idea, that nobody should review flash cards while driving. Actually, I had not even considered that anyone would do it. But someone did. Actually, according to some redditor who do it :
And, as I answered:
You know what. I've been contributing to Anki ecosystem in one way or another for the past 5 years. This post is the very first time someone was able to make me reconsider whether it was a good choice.
Syntax coloring of code in Anki
![b1er84ly53c61.png, mar. 2022](/blog_en/public/b1er84ly53c61.png)
Programmers, we love having our code colored, bold, and so on, to get a quick overview of the code structure. Highligh does a really great job, however up to now, I have not seen anybody successfully using it in Anki and AnkiDroid. This is now done. Please, user of iOS let us know whether it works too
What can Anki ecosystem do with more money
Anki ecosystem in general, and ankidroid in particular, evolves with a lot of constrains. There is few developpers, most of us are students or have a full-time job with it. Also, AnkiDroid do not officially exists, we are just a github repo and a play store account. This mean that AnkiDroid and anki ecosystem is currently limited by volunteer time and the little amount of money that we get through donation[1]. In this post, I'll consider what we may be able to do if we got a lot more money.
This are my personal thought, published without reviews by anybody else. In particular it does not endorse my employer, or any other maintainers or contributors of any mentioned product.
Note
[1] Plus sales for AnkiMobile on iOS, but that is only for AnkiTekts, and pay for AnkiWeb, the synchronization/hosting/deck sharing service.
Google Summer of Code, point of view of a new admin/org
It's been a month since it has been announced that AnkiDroid was selected for Google Summer of Code (GSoC). Here is the story of a new admin, in a first-time organization. As it’s standard to state, views are my own, not my employer nor my organization. It explains how we went from unprepared to a huge success even before the end of the application phase!
The scheduler problem
The Scheduler problem is the biggest open problem in the Anki/Spaced repetition learning community I believe. As any good research problems, there are two questions to consider: what are the problems we want to solve, and how to solve them. I've no idea how to solve them, but at least, I hope I can […]
Is it selfish to contribute to Anki ecosystem ?
I had an interesting definition problem of late. I was wondering whether contributing to the Anki community was selfish, or even egoistical.
By itself, the answer is not important, those are only a word, but I believe the question to be of interest nonetheless.
Collaborative decks in Anki
A lot of people want to create collaborative deck for Anki. In September 2018, I had already made quite a few add-ons, and some people contacted me thus to discuss collaborative decks. It has always been in the back of my head since. I'm going to try to write down every thoughts I had and why it seems quite complex.
How to plug a scheduling algorithm into Anki
Recently, I've seen a lot of discussion about improving anki scheduling algorithm. In this post, I intend to explain how any developper can do it; at least as long as they know what scheduling rules they want to use. I'll also discuss the limit I see.
How hard can it be to code a feature to let users resize images in a software.
In this post, I expect to show you why it may be difficult to create a seemingly simple program. In particular, to do it well. I'll show case with the last program I wrote, an add-on for Anki. More precisely, the most wanted add-on for anki, according to the vote of users of anki's subreddit: being able to resize image in the editor. This seems to be a simple add-on; after all, resizing by dragging corner has been done in every editing software for decades[1]. In this post, I intend to document all of the things which made me loose time when I created the add-on "Resize image" for anki. I also created a video showing how the add-on works.
Note
[1] Appart from LaTeX, but let's not consider it.
How I learn lyrics with anki
After years of using anki, I finally found a nice way to learn lyrics. I think I tried three different methods before finding one which works for me. More precisely, I found it a few months ago, and after testing it, I can finally way I found something which works.
To be more precise, I want to learn lyrics of song I love. Songs I've heard a lot of time, and whose meaning I know. The method I give here would not be efficient for a new song. In this post, I'll first explain what I want anki to do, and why I want it. I'll explain how to do it in a second part.
How I automated the test of anki's GUI
Here is how I created automatic test for Anki's user interface. Those tricks may potentially be useful potentially for other (py)Qt project.
Learning how to play music with anki
I've been playing music for half of my life. But while I was enjoying sight reading partitions, and sometime practiced a little bit the boring part (scales, arpeggios), I have been stuck. Here is a list of what changed:
- The most frustrating thing for me being that I relied on partitions. Which means that if you gave me a piano or guitar without a partition, I wasn't able to play anything. I found that ridiculous, and anki helped me solve that.
- Similarly, I played classical guitar, and I didn't know how to read tab. Because, honestly, they are so many chords, I keep forgetting them. Which means that, if you give me a song with tab, as they are hundred of thousands of them, I couldn't play it, because it was not written in a way I can easily read. I don't know every single chord yet (and I'll probably never know them all), I know far more chords today than what I knew before I started anki, and it clearly helps learning songs and doing improv.
The example in this post are related to ocarina, guitar, piano, harmonica and tin whistle. I will explain what differs and what is similar for all of those instruments. Some explanation may not always be clear, if you don't know the instruments I'm talking about. But don't worry, if you don't understand, just read the next paragraph, you should be able to get the general idea.
This article will be illustrated using almost only cards that I have really seen the day I was writing this article. You can find here my [piano], [guitar] and [ocarina] decks. They are far from being perfect, some typos may still be in them. But it may help you to understand what I write here. And maybe you can find them useful in your collection.
Hundred's of deck in Anki: why it can be useful
I am going to try to explain why I do have hundreds of deck and subdecks. Furthermore, why I believe there is currently no better way to achieve my goal with anki.
Anki and learning which require practice (origami, knot, instrument...)
I use anki to learn things which require practice. Origami, drawing, music, rope (nodes and shibari). Music will be considered in another text.
I consider two kinds of practical knowledge:
- some practice requires making choices regularly (like drawing, or musical improv)
- some practice requires learning and practicing some exact moves over and over. That may be the case when you want to learn a musical piece, or how to tie some particular note.
I don' have any idea how to deal with the first kind of knowledge, thus I'll only consider the second kind. I'll list here different methods, which depends on what I want to learn. I don't know in general how to decide which method is the best one.
Lists in anki: desiderata and partial solution
In this text, I assume you are familiar with anki, and in particular know what is a field, a card, a card's type (aka template), a note and a note's type (aka a model), and that you have an idea of what are the rules used by anki to decide which cards should be generated or not.
There is one big limitation in anki, it concerns lists[1]. Here I list my trouble, the existing work arounds I know, their limits, and the functionnality I would really want. Sadly, this functionnality seems to require such a big modification of anki's underlying model that I fear that no add-on can answer my request. In particular if I want this request to also be satisfied in smartphone's application, which does not allows to add add-ons.
Learning a list of things is hard, but it's something I sometime want to do. A poem/song is just a list of line. Sometime, a mathematical notions have 4 distinct names. E.g. a pullback is also called a fiber product, a fibered product and a Cartesian square. In some othe case, a mathematical objects admits many distinct definitions[2]. E.g. I've got 5 definitions of left-trivial monoids. And I'd also wanted to see if I can learn the list of the prime number less than 100. Mostly to see how hard it is to learn an arbitrary list.
Using anki to learn names and people
Anki changed my life in a lot of way. But the most obvious one is that, thanks to Anki, I do finally recall people's name !
Note on an introduction on Anki given a 35C3
This post is a comment about a self-organised workshop Introduction to anki I gave at #35C3 (35th Chaos Communication Congress, a congress of 17k hackers). This workshop was announced on the anki's subredd where I asked for ideas. I received a lot of useful feedback from this subreddit and from the related discord server. The main audience of the current blog post is thus those person, already in anki's community. This post contains idea in random order.
How I lost and recovered five thousand notes in anki
I recently had a big problem with anki. Here I'm going to explain what was the problem, how I partially solved it, and what was not solved at all.