LingQ to Anki

Support & Feedback Forum
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Hello!

I want to export my LingQ’s to my ANKI account. When I hit the export button in LingQ is gives me this:

impredecible,“[[”“en”“, ““unpredictable””]]”,…el tiempo es más impredecible.
mes,“[[”“en”“, ““month””]]”,“…voy de viaje el mes de agosto, la última…”
aunque,“[[”“en”“, ““although””]]”,“…suele ser más barato, aunque a veces el tiempo…”
veces,“[[”“en”“, ““times””]]”,“…más barato, aunque a veces el tiempo es más…”
viaje,“[[”“en”“, ““trip””]]”,…Cuándo te vas de viaje?
agosto,“[[”“en”“, ““August””]]”,“…viaje el mes de agosto, la última semana, que…”
barato,“[[”“en”“, ““Cheap””]]”,“…que suele ser más barato, aunque a veces el…”
ser,“[[”“en”“, ““be””]]”,“…última semana, que suele ser más barato, aunque a…”
suele,“[[”“en”“, ““usually””]]”,“…la última semana, que suele ser más barato, aunque…”
última,“[[”“en”“, ““last””]]”,“…mes de agosto, la última semana, que suele ser…”

How do I get this format into ANKI??

I am on a MAC by the way…

Thank you for your time and efforts!

Best,

Ryan

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I had this problem years ago when I used Anki a lot. I don’t get why LingQ outputs this way. What I did was I opened these lists in Excel and formatted them a bit.

3

Thanks for the reply. I’ll try it out. I see you have over 50,000 words known in German. That is awesome. How long did it take you to get that much knowledge of the language?

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I have not really been using LingQ in a while due to concentration on work, but I would say to get to 50,000 took a couple of years of pretty hard work. It also helps that German has loads of different forms for most words, which inflates the statistics quite a bit.

5

all you need to do is write a short script to parse through the text and remove/replace the bits you want to remove. super easy.

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For only a small fraction of the population is writing a short script to do anything super difficult.

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I’ve created a webpage to convert your site-exported LingQ’s to a tab-deliminated format that’s suitable for import into Anki. It was created in a hurry, so it’s kinda ghetto and might explode on you, but it seems to work with everything I’ve tried so far.

You can find the page here: https://devio.us/~bapa/lingq_stuff/csv_to_anki.html

A screenshot of it in action can be found here: http://i.imgur.com/xBkM6JX.png

Cheers, and lemmie know if it works.

EDIT: I also noticed you said you were on macOS. If your system opens your exported LingQs .CSV file in the Numbers application (which I think it does by default), and then copy-and-paste your exported data from within Numbers, into the converter, then the conversion might fail. So, try opening the .CSV file in TextEdit instead and copying from there.

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I’d imagine that the reason it’s exported that way is because the exported file is made for being re-imported back into LingQ itself, and not other applications. And because LingQ can store multiple definitions for a word/sentence (and because it also stores what language the definition is written in too), it necessitates exporting each LingQ’s definitions in a structured format (JSON, in this case).

Maybe adding an option to export one’s LingQs in a straight-up tab-deliminated format – in addition to the format suitable for re-importing back into LingQ – might be a good idea.

In the meantime, for anyone that’s interested, I wrote a converter that can remove the JSON formatting around your exported LingQs’ definitions, so that you can import it into Anki. You can find it in a post I wrote if you scroll down a bit.

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