If you don't like Anki, consider giving Mochi a try

Japanese
#23

Yeah, I have to agree with the above comment by rdennison. There are so many SRS services out there already (and most of them offer a better SRS system and/or better features than the Bunpro one) that spending time on expanding the Bunpro system isn’t worth pursuing immediately. That is how I feel as a user, anyway. Maybe from a business perspective it is worth doing but…

I use JPDB for vocab (and it can be used for kanji although I use the excellent Kanji Study app on Android for that) and, despite having issues, it is miles ahead of the Bunpro vocab SRS system. I don’t use Anki but, equally, it is insanely versatile and pretty much does everything you might want it to do.

I would want to see time and effort spent on improving the grammar side of Bunpro rather than anything else. I guess this is personal opinion only and, again, if there are compelling financial reasons to not do that then I understand. But I I don’t think I would recommend a beginner to use the Bunpro system for vocab.

Sorry this is a slight derail on the thread topic so to keep it as relevant as possible I will say that people should check out JPDB for vocab if you don’t like Anki.

4 Likes
#24

Wow, that is a cute blog. Just try to hover your cursor over the digletts.

In general it is a very pleasing to look at colour scheme.

1 Like
#25

I definitely follow the same light, and I’ve found after a couple of years of learning Japanese that I’ve fallen into using several services that can do one thing really well: Satori Reader for reading comprehension, Anki+Yomichan for vocab, BunPro for grammar. If I wanted to, I could do all three of those things on each of those platforms (minus reading comprehension on Anki, reading paragraphs in an SRS format just doesn’t seem useful :joy:), but I feel like my study time can be better spent with the several platforms that are a master of one instead of a jack of all trades that is master of none. I feel like I started to fall off of the Genki books because of this; they try to teach you vocab and grammar, explain cultural phenomena, provide readings, give and you practice material to challenge yourself, but I personally didn’t see as much progress as when I started to use more and more of these programs.

All of this to say, that’s just my opinion, and if you guys try and branch out to strengthen other aspects of your program, that’s definitely a plus, but I think sticking to grammar as your #1 is keen.

1 Like
#26

Damn Yomichan and Anki integration for card creation is sick. Just watched a Youtube vid on it. You might have just converted me! Mochi needs an integration like that too.
Any good manga (as CBZ/PDF/Image files) readers with that type of integration too?

But if one is serious about learning, I think they should be willing to spare just a 'lil pain. :wink:

Yeah I’ve switched SRS tool about ~3 times, so a bit fatigued at this point (used Anki, Memrise, WK etc.). Curious to see if anyone has tried Memrise here. Was a bit of a ball-ache.

In my humble opinion, I think it would be very, very difficult to offer more compelling features than the setup I have for Yomichan/Anki

Yeah I can see the appeal. The stack you’ve got for vocab seems pretty OP!
I think the pros for Bunpro Vocab SRS (once you finalize Decks especially) will be the curated nature of the content.
I dream of Cloze questions that have a bunch of hints/extra detail, all curated by our content team.
But if you can’t tell by my badge, I’m a lil biased :cowboy_hat_face:

#27

I have used them all, and right now, I have just decide to grind out reading and a basic kanji app and leave it that. Vocab comes naturally. That is how I learned English. It is how I will learn the back 20,000 words of Japanese I have left to go. After the first 2000~3000 words There are quickly diminishing return from such deliberate practice I’m my experience. Especially The worry over optimizing the exact structure of the SRS.

For those intrested I am currently using LingQ as a reader and pseudo SRS. It is essentially a overclocked kindlesque online/app reader. The killer feature is that it keeps track of your words and has community definitions for phrases.

It’s glitchy and buggy and strange, but that is par for the course in this space. It’s been developed by Steve Kaufmann if that means anything to you. This person gives a decent overview of how to use it: How to use LingQ.

Keep in mind that it is optimized for space based languages and the notorious issue of parsing is constant problem, but if you are already an intermediate to advanced learner it’s at least worth checking out.

Edit

Mixed up the Steve linguists lol

1 Like
#28

I love LingQ’s concept, but as you said, it’s just not designed for Japanese and we can’t blame them. Despite being in the “golden era” of AI, I have yet to see a software/library that efficiently parses Japanese words in a text.

I seriously wanted to love it, but I absolutely hated the UX and the stock articles were uninteresting to me. I tried importing my texts and ebooks and it was a nightmare.

I think Anki is still the most efficient method, you just have to stop being obsessed with 100% memorizing the word(s).

2 Likes
#29

You really are not wrong, but it you can get it too work its magical. I mostly read through community posted stuff and edit it as I go along. I am reading through the first Harry Potter as a test and the error rate is surprisingly low.

1 Like
#30

Just wanted to clarify quickly that Mochi isn’t being suggested as an Anki replacement or even necessarily a vocab SRS app. SRS was kept in the description mainly because that’s how the creator describes it so I didn’t want to change that.

I have been using both Anki and Mochi and one use case that I have found Mochi to be very good at is reviewing summary sheets. It might just be me but compare to when the summary sheets were in separate documents, it has been much easier to just click the deck tab then cram button to quickly refresh my memory. The deck isn’t in the review queue.

Anki + Yomichan is excellent but if you don’t want to set it up and have a Kindle, you can use the built-in vocab builder to save your look ups and it will grab the context sentence with it. It’s obviously not as feature rich as AnkiYomi but it only requires a toggle to enable.

#31

It shouldn’t be to hard to get a “bridge” working. Yomichan is essentially just doing local http requests to Anki. Just write small tool that exposes a REST API like Anki. Point Yomichan to it instead of Anki and then translate it to matching Mochi REST API calls that create the card in the deck you want.

#32

Guys, might be a very dumb question, but when you are a talking about Anki, you talk about the web based app called Anki, the one with a blue star or AnkiApp, which both require a 30ish euros yearly subscription? Thanks

#33

Anki is the one with the blue star. As far as I know all versions other than then iOS version should be free. The iOS version is a one time purchase.

2 Likes
#34

Na don’t recommend it.

Anki decks failing to import due to attachments being larger than 5MB.
No premade decks.

Anki is just superior.
If you don’t think so, your wrong.

If you just want to be aesthetically pleased, then go for it:
https://ankiweb.net/shared/info/1150874988

Anki has enough mods to make it however you want, there is no need for another clone of it.

#35

LingQ was developed by Steve Kaufmann, not Stephen Krashen. Although I guess they know each other so I wouldn’t be surprised if Stephen Krashen had some significant input into the app.

It’s been a while since I tried it, but I’m really surprised to hear it’s “not designed for Japanese”, since Steve Kaufmann is fluent in both Mandarin and Japanese. What kind of problems are people having with it?

#36

Poetry.

4 Likes
#37

Honestly as somebody that’s trying to get back into front-end development after teaching English for several years his website REALLY makes me feel inferior haha

#38

lol Thanks for catching my typo, I tend to comment in a fugue. I will fix it!

In regards to what problems does it still have with Japanese is just that Japanese it hard to parse an account of it not having spaces. So curated content is generally guaranteed to be correct, but user uploaded content often has parsing errors, that leads to incorrect vocabulary generation. If you are intermediate or above usually you can figure it out, but that just means that it is less approachable for a beginner.

He was fluent in Japanese and mandarin long ago, mostly due to learning Chinese in his younger days, have a huge head start on kanji when he went on to learn Japanese.

1 Like
#39

For other people who stumble over this thread:

I also had the 5MB problem. After having a look at it, it’s easily fixed. The decks which can’t be imported because of this error message all embed their own Japanese fonts - and since we’re talking about Japanese, these font files are rather large (i. e. > 5MB).

The solution is to import the deck in question into Anki, remove the references to the font from the card templates (most likely from the styling sections) and export the deck again (obviously including media files). The newly exported deck should import into Mochi without problems.

Afterwards, the template inside Mochi might or might not need some tweaking. One deck I tested (the popular Core 2.3k) got imported absolutely flawlessly, it basically looks and works 1:1 compared with Anki. Other decks (like the Tango or Genki ones) need some fixing, which is however rather trivial to do (since we’re talking about Markdown with some added syntax). I guess this depends on how clean the Anki card templates are. I think the creator of Mochi recommends to remove all formatting first.

Once a deck is actually imported, Mochi is in my opinion a lot more pleasant to use than Anki. However, I’m not sure how custom decks would work. One the one hand, Mochi offers a lot of dictionary / AI / speech generation functionality which could make creating custom decks a breeze. On the other hand, it’s missing something like Yomichan.

While Anki is the most feature-rich solution, just googling for optimized Anki settings shows that something is very wrong. A software should solve the problems its users have instead of creating additional problems. The sheer amount of “experts” presenting their various settings (at times obviously crappy), the ever-changing solutions for ease hell, all the must-have plugins etc. is astonishing. And there’s the (reasonable) learning curve for the application itself. I think a lot of people would profit from a software like Anki with advanced features (Yomichan or image occlusion) but a lot more opinionated settings, especially when it comes to the learning algorithm (see: WaniKani or Bunpro). There are scientists who research this stuff, so why do other people need to deal with it? In my opinion the only reason Anki is popular is the huge ecosystem - because the application itself is off-putting at best.

#40

Your saying that right after "the solution to import decks into mochi is to remove the font of the deck"

That is some high quality bs like mochi.

#41

In case you think I suggested Mochi as a superior product, I didn’t. Actually, I pointed out that it’s (also) missing features which become crucial at some point.

The thing is that there is no actual (easier to use, more modern) real alternative, when there should be. There’s either Anki (convulted, tries to do everything) or stuff like Kitsun, Mochi, Quizlet, Bunpro vocabs etc. (half baked and most of the time impossible to extend). Pretty sure it’d be possible to have something in between.

Regarding the (probably arbitrary) 5MB limit, yeah, that’s BS. And considering like half of the Japanese decks don’t work because of this (probably also true for at least Chinese), it’s likely doing some real damage to the product.

1 Like
#42

I apologize for thinking that you suggested Mochi as a superior product.

It looks like we are on the same page.
Yes, Anki might be overwhelming but being able to change so many things is actually good.

I first started off learning how Anki works, then what the best settings are, then I researched studies that show in which intervals you retain most of the information in your long term memory.

But in the end all you need is to look at your statistics, and to know how to adjust the settings. So that in the end your young/mature cards stay at a 95% correct answered percentage.

What I use are these settings:
For new Cards: Learning steps “5m 20m”, Graduating interval “1”, Easy interval: “5”.
Lapses: Relearning steps “10m”, Minimum interval “1”, Leech threshold “99” (you don’t want any leech cards) Leech action: “Tag only”.
Advanced: Max interval “36500”, Starting ease “2,50”, Easy bonus “1,40”, Interval modifier “1”, Hard interval “1,20”, New interval “0”.

I hope that maybe this can help you, and I hope that you can understand that the reason why Anki has so many features is, that everyone learns different, and you need to find what is best for you and adjust it to that.