cadnza
commented
3 years ago Hi @camerooncameroon, glad you like it! Here are a few answers:
- For the Hanzi animations, do you have an example of a term you're trying to add? You might have found an edge case, in which case I'll need to do a little debugging. In the meantime, feel free to give the readme a skim if you haven't yet.
- Regarding bulk adding, unfortunately the extension doesn't support it. 😔 You'll likely want an external tool for that—there's only so much that Anki extensions can do, especially from the card dialog where this particular extension works. Alternately, you might look into pre-made Chinese decks from the Anki community.*
- Adding pinyin to a whole deck would be wonderful, wouldn't it? I did something similar to add videos to my ASL deck, and I can tell you from that experience that this extension isn't your best option for that. Your best bet will probably be to map your fields in a spreadsheet and then export it as an Anki deck. That'll give you fine control over which animation file goes with which term. Beyond that, you'll have to get creative if you want them to map automatically. 🙂
* A little more on bulk adding cards: It should be a pretty straightforward process, especially if you're downloading a pre-made Chinese deck from Anki, but from personal experience, I'm not sure I recommend it. A good 75% of learning a new word for me takes place when I physically make the flashcard in Anki, and adding information in bulk cuts out that experience.
The guy who wrote Fluent Forever says something similar:
The card construction process is one of the most fun and satisfying ways to learn a language. Content in the knowledge that every detail will become a permanent memory, you become the architect of your own mind. What breed of dog will you think of when you wish to remember the word dog? Which examples will you choose to form your verb conjugations? What vocabulary is most useful for your own life?
Making these decisions forms an exciting part of the learning process and, ultimately, takes very little time. After getting used to your SRS, you can add new cards in a matter of seconds. For most nouns, you can simply type the word once, search for a picture on Google Images, and copy (or draw) it onto your card. This can take less than fifteen seconds. Imagery for more complicated ideas will, of course, take more time to identify—a process that itself gives you the connections you need to make a word your own.
I sincerely wish I could sell my personal flash card decks. If their usefulness were transferable, I'd make a lot of money and help a lot of people. Instead, I give them away for free on my website with the disclaimer that no one has successfully used them to learn a language. Of the few thousand people who have downloaded them, no one has tried to refute that claim, so I feel confident stating here that my personal decks are useless to anyone but myself. Use them at your own peril.
- Gabriel Wyner
Fluent Forever, Chapter 2
Italics in original text
Do take that with a grain of salt, though. Everyone learns differently, and it could very well be that adding flashcards in bulk goes a long way toward helping you learn Chinese. If that's the case, the Anki community can be your best friend; there are a lot of pre-made Chinese decks out there, some of very high quality. And if you'd like to make your own in bulk, Wiktionary's Mandarin frequency lists wouldn't be a bad place to start (if Mandarin is what you're learning).
camerooncameroon
guitargeekgreg
Hello! Thanks for awesome idea, I'm totally obsessed how to make it work )) Hanzi animations not loading, whatever I do. Can also bulk-mode adding information feature be added to the add-on? So that animations (pinyin etc) could be added to a whole deck?