Yes even in a post about Anki I still want to show off a card at the start!
I just thought the phrase was cute, to be honest. This is from Nana!
Hello everyone! I’ve been meaning to make this post for awhile because I’ve changed up my workflow a bit since the last time I wrote about sentence banks and how I use them. I didn’t want to wait too long because then I may change things up again, and I really love having this sort of thing snapshotted in my life.
First, a quick review on a few terms:
Sentence Bank is a collection of decks within Anki or elsewhere. Search for a word in the bank and find a good sentence for the word.
0T, 1T, 2T is how I describe sentences with zero new things, 1 new things, and 2 or more new things. When learning a new word, I want a 1T sentence, with the 1 thing being my new word. Too many new things per sentence means I’d have a card with too much information on it, and I don’t want that!
The biggest change has been including the Cross Profile Search and Import add-on into my Anki. Literally life changing for me!
So previously, I would have my sentence bank decks as part of the same profile as my mining deck. This meant that syncing was a pain, and as a result I grew to want a smaller bank. I did not actually want a smaller bank! Bigger is better for me!
So now, with the Cross Profile add-on, I could simply make a “Sentence Bank” profile and just switch between them. My issue then became, “how can I continue to make my bank smaller by eliminating 0T sentences with Morphman?”. Honestly, the solution to that was easy too. I would simply export my mining deck from my main profile every now and then, and re-import it into the Sentence Bank profile and recalculate Morphman normally.
Another thing I’ve been using is a new tool that’s basically just the JPDB Reader but made to be used with Anki. Essentially, it uses JPDB’s parser to show me any new words. It can theoretically also show me words in learning and other states as well, but I only care about cards that are new. I can also technically grade them with the extension, but it’s not what I’m after.
What this does is help me “catch-up” a bit by adding words I know to a deck I have called “The Morph Zone”. I’ve re-started SRS so many times throughout the years, so having a way to see words marked as “new” but that I technically know has been helpful. This will also make it easier to get true 1T cards in my bank as well. I realized Morphman gets finnicky if I manually mark words as known and then delete them later, so I want a deck that has all my known morphs in them. I add “new” words that I can see thanks to the Anki-JPDB-Reader into “The Morph Zone” and then I change the due date to be something like 7,200 days into the future. Basically, marked as known!
One more tool I’ve utilized recently is called Voice Vox. There is an add-on that works with it, but I only use it sometimes so I just use ShareX with the program open. I prefer to have native audio wherever possible, but the text-to-speech here is actually kind of fun!
Now that I’ve described a little bit of what I use for the process, I’ll run through exactly how I use everything!
Let’s say I’m reading a book in the ttu reader.
All of the slightly lavender text is something that the Anki-JPDB-Reader is telling me is “new”. I don’t really know what to do about ほど since I’ve added every iteration possible and it STILL resists me, but I just kind of ignore it. There’s a few other things I could add though! Let’s double check the Yomichan settings to make sure I properly configured the cards for “The Morph Zone”.
Looks good! I also prefer to add a tag when I’m adding things that I’ll be yeeting off into the future to mark as known too.
Good good. I’m all set! Now I’ll just add everything that’s a bit purple to “The Morph Zone” that I do not struggle to understand at all. I’ll then refresh to make sure the card state changes to “new and in a deck”, since before they were “new but not in a deck”.
Nice! Now usually I do this later on after an entire reading session, but for the purpose of showing off how this works I’m going to go into “The Morph Zone” and do the magic.
I always love seeing the pile of “new” cards that I can yeet. So now time to select these and control+shift+D!
7,200 was just an arbitrary number. It puts them so far out I don’t even know that I’ll be using Anki at the time. But, this means Morphman will see these as words I know well and thus new 0T and 1T cards will be born.
I can recalculate right away to so that this:
Goes to this:
Not a huge change, but a change nonetheless!
Refreshing my book will also show the difference as well!
Now for the words I couldn’t immediately remember reading or meaning on, I’ll want to find a card from my sentence bank. I’ll either do one of two things. Stop reading and make cards immediately, or have a clipboard insertion page open and just copy and new words to the clipboard so I get a nice list. Unless you play VNs, you may not be too familiar with a clipboard insertion page, so I recommend this page for some more information!
I really like using the clipboard page because I don’t always feel like making cards until later. Like maybe I have a half-hour before bed and I don’t feel like doing anything else, so I can go back and look at my list of new words from the day and start making cards. I can Yomichan on the clipboard page too so it’s just super easy. If there’s ever definitions with new words, I can see them since I’m copying them and make cards for those new words too. An endless loop of fun! For this purpose though, I’m going to make a card right away.
So all I need to do is open up Cross Profile Search/Import from the menu up top and then I get a fun search screen! We’ll do 荒涼 first.
Despite having more than 600,000 cards on my Sentence Bank profile, this didn’t stutter at all for me! How cool is that?
So from the list of cards that have the word, I want to find the one that sparks the most joy.
Oh that’s right! What I’m reading has an audiobook that got turned into subtitles, so I have the exact sentence right here! 北方 still shows as a morph since I haven’t updated my bank profile with my new and improved Morph Zone deck, but I’ll get to that later.
If you would prefer to edit any of these cards before importing, you’re able to! But I noticed that the tags get deleted whenever I do that, so I just do all my editing post-import.
Yay! Super easy. Now on my second monitor I have the clipboard page, so it’s just a matter of copy/pasting my favorite definitions and other information into the appropriate fields.
Thankfully I have a ton of definitions to choose from! I just wanted to show off that Yomichan does indeed work in here! Literally makes the whole process so easy.
There we have it! A card is born. As I’m sure you can guess, having to copy and paste and find the right sentence in the first place can take a bit of time, so I will usually opt to just curate a list of words and spend a bit of time throughout the week adding cards. I don’t usually do a lot of new cards per day so I end up with a bit of a backlog. I previously did not like having a backlog when all I did was make a card with AnkiConnect, because I’d end up with cards that lacked quality. Here, I spend a bit more time to do a few quality cards and I really enjoy it!
Any words I don’t get to that are on the clipboard, I just copy into an Evernote note and get to them eventually. This means more time for reading and only making Anki cards when I feel like it!
Even with all the audiobook decks I’ve added lately, I will still sometimes come across words I do not have a card for. This is where Voice Vox can come in! I’ll use the same sentence as an example.
Voice Vox has a ton of different characters with different voices to choose from. So it can be fun to try to line up the Voice Vox character with whatever you’re reading!
There’s not a whole bunch of male voices to choose from, but you can adjust them a bit! Some of them have different emotions too.
At the end of the day it’s still TTS, but it’s fun! Once I’ve got an audio clip I’m happy with, I just use ShareX to record it and paste it into my Anki field. I don’t use this too often, otherwise I’d just set up the add-on. But if I need to be running the program anyway to use the add-on, I figured I’d just do it this way! I really, really want to have a solid sentence bank so I can have native audio wherever possible, but sometimes I just cannot let a sentence go! So I’d rather add some fun TTS to it.
But basically, this is what my screens will look like whenever I’m in “card making mode”!
God I don’t even know if you can see it well, but across both monitors I feel like such a hackerman desperately trying to get more Japanese into my brain!
I still have so many more decks I’d like to add to my bank, but I’ve been enjoying getting my Morphman count back up a bit. I’ll probably never be back at JPDB numbers, at least not for a long time, but having ways to clearly see what’s new to Anki makes that process go by much faster. And goodness do I love the Cross Profile search! I make sure all my Sentence Bank cards are a similar note type to my Mining deck one, and that probably helps too. I don’t have to worry about mapping them to different fields or anything.
Oh, and any card I use from the Cross Profile search gets tagged with “Used”. So I can clear those out in my Sentence Bank profile in addition to 0T cards. Honestly have no idea where I’d be without this add-on! It’s way too good for how I like to use Anki.
I have some pretty big reading goals ahead of me, so I know my list of new words that I’ll need to find sentences for from my bank will only grow with time. But making a few quality cards like this and spending more time reading than Anki-ing is definitely how I want to do things!
As far as mining from anime goes, that’s just beyond easy! I can look up the exact line and find the word in my bank, provided I have the show as a subs2srs deck. Thankfully, there’s a bunch of those if you just know where to look.
My Visual Novel process hasn’t changed much either! I just adjust my AnkiConnect settings so I’m not just doing already known words, and then I just use ShareX to grab the audio and a screenshot and put those in the right fields.
I’m not sure how my Anki workflow will evolve from here, or how my Sentence Bank will look in the future. People keep coming up with super cool add-ons and workflows, and I’ve enjoyed trying out new things to push myself further!
Only 7,462 cards to go for my Anki goal! So time to get back to reading and mining!
Thanks for sharing your current Anki workflow!
The Cross Profile Search add-on sound great, I was always wondering about how to handle neatly sentence banks without the downsides of having so many cards in your profile. That add-on really sounds like a godsend haha.
I personally couldn't see myself regularly using a workflow like yours at my current level, with the "new words to create cards for" backlog and so on. It is *the* main reason I soft-dropped Japanese years ago after passing the N3, but that's mainly because I didn't have a broad enough vocabulary and close to 0 experience with immersion. Having to go through the slow process of creating cards for things I had very little comprehension of meant that immersion felt more like active studying, so I didn't look forward to it very much. Finding JPDB (~4 months ago) saved me from that and allowed me to befriend Japanese again!
I get that this is a non-issue for you having already learned a tooon of vocab, since you can do Anki on the side and immerse anyways, allowing you to create just the cards you want and anytime you want to. I am considering switching to Anki again if ever reach a large amount of vocab, but I'm still not sure if I'll do that (except maybe for grammar, I want to start doing some active grammar study through Anki in the near future) since JPDB works well for me and I don't really have too many major gripes (I do have a few small ones though haha). And it allows me to focus my fairly limited free time in fun immersion rather than spending time on card creation which I don't enjoy doing. But I'm happy that you have found a workflow that suits you and that you enjoy, and grateful that you posted about it in such detail ^^
Question: for new words, if you find a good candidate in your sentence bank, do you just use that card? i.e. you don't manually create a card if you find a good example in the sentence bank, right? (I guess you still add the definition as you see fit)
I can't believe you're at 2.5k already. That's incredible!! Thanks for sharing the intricacies of your workflow, always very fun to get a peek behind the curtain.