I use to do ANKI to accumulate vocabulary, but I’ve used LingQ for pick up some texts to practice listening and reading. So, give you opinion about it, what do you think about it?
Nem sei se você vai ler isso, mas o Anki, em minha opinião, é uma ferramenta indispensável para aprender idiomas. Eu faço assim: Estudo os textos adicionando as sentenças presentes nele no Anki, as reviso e escuto o áudio.
Fazendo assim, a compreensão vai aumentado
Anki is a great tool for simply getting to know loads of vocabulary, it is in my opinion one of the best ones you can use for that. But you will never make any progress if you just focus on single words, or on words from some shared decks that you downloaded and which you have never used or seen used in any text.
Lingq on the other hand, is great for interesting material, but it is (at least for me) not enough to hear and re-hear, read and re-read texts over and over again. I think I am just not an ‘acustic learner’, but I am a strong ‘visual learner’. This might be different for you, though. So I experienced tons of Lingqs in even simple texts, but the words just didn’t want to stick to my head, even after 40+ repetitions and 20+ re-reads. Whereas on Anki, after some 5 to 10 times a card popped up, it is stored firmly (of course there is a small percentage of leeked vocab, but this is then mostly the not useful stuff I don’t encounter elsewhere).
Buuuuut, it is also possible to export one’s Lingqs into Anki, which is a great possibility to combine both tools. I listen to new texts in Lingq and then make Anki cards out of these, which enables me to keep track of new vocab and acquire it over time. As long as the pace of both is approximately the same, it is very powerful and effective in my experience.
Hello Lingobernie,
You wrote “But you will never make any progress if you just focus on single words” . I agree, but of course you can put whole sentences into Anki: words in context, that seems to me more effective than just single words. My question is: do you see a difference between the flashcards of Anki and those of Lingq?
And I’d like to know how you transfer your links from Lingq to Anki.
Hello benscheelings,
yes that is correct. I always try to have example sentences for new words in my Anki cards as well. But at least the front side is mostly just one word/expression of which I search for the translation (of course in both directions), and the sentence is then only in the target language, since I want to turn on my ‘target language mode’, not my ‘see a one-by-one translation mode’, even if I then might not be able to understand the whole sentence.
An example to illustrate this:
For Chinese, I have a card that looks like Front: Chinese characters, Back: Pinyin, Chinese explanation and/or translation of the word, usage/Chinese example sentence, some grammar comments (useful especially for proverbes: are they derogatory or neutral, can they be used as verbes, subjects, objects, qualifiers, … ).
For Russian, my cards rather look like Front: Russian, Back: translation, Russian example sentences, irregular conjugations/declination, related words I already know, …
For the second card I just swap the front with the translation/explanation field, so that I have also a one-word-front.
Lingqs own flashcards are great for a start, but I have the impression that the algorithm when to show you which cards is somewhat weaker then Anki’s, and Anki’s statistics are really great! On the other hand, Lingq has Cloze tests, which I also use.
1 Like
And how to import Lingqs to Anki:
1.) Select the lingqs you want to import by filtering (for example, only show lingqs for a certain lesson).
2.) Tick all of them and export them to a .csv file
3.) Open the file and copy everything to Excel (or numbers)
3.a) If you want to import more than 200 Lingqs (the max number to display in Lingq at once), repeat steps 1-3 until all the desired lingqs are in the same excel file, one line for each Lingq
4.) Split the entries into more then one column by using the ‘Data to columns’ function
5.) Use the Replace… dialog in order to get rid of remaining [, ", … signs that you do not really want to have in your cards
6.) Maybe you need some more formatting
7.) Once you have the new words, the translations and the sentences in one column, respectively, and everything is formatted nicely, save your file as a .csv (it has to be in UTF-8 format)
8.) Now you should be able to import everything at once into Anki, designing the three columns to three fields on your cards.
This is basically how I do it, I hope it helps you. If you have questions/problems, feel free to post them here. 
6 Likes
Thank you, Lingobernie, for your detailed explanation!
Thank you, Lingobernie! I’ve been wondering how to export from LingQ and import to Anki.
Hi Lingobernie. Thanks for this. just want to clarify a couple of points.
In (4) you mean the Data menu - Text to Columns, right?
Then in screen 1 you are changing Fixed Width to Delimited, then in screen 2 choosing Space as delimiter, right?
When I save as CSV or as Text there’s no option on my version of Excel to switch to UTF-8. Should I choose Unicode text?
(I know that in Word when I save as Text there’s an option to change to UTF-8 and I use this, but I can’t seem to find this feature in Excel)
Thanks in advance
Hej David,
sorry for my late reply.
- yes, exactly. Then choose Delimited and in the second screen I’m not sure any more what the exported csv’s look like, but choose the symbol that separates the word from its translations. This should probably be something like a comma or semicolon. Space would separate too much. For example in the French ‘aller - to go’ you would get three or four columns instead of two… In that case the work becomes nasty for big sets of exported cards…
And as far as I know, Anki requires UTF-8, but you can try with another format that your Excel supports. I remember that at least Excel for Mac doesn’t support this option, here you can use Numbers (the Apple version of excel) instead. For Windows, I think Excel should support UTF-8 out-of-the-box, otherwise you can try LibreOffice Calc (an open-source version). On Linux, LibreOffice Calc should do the job, as far as I know.
I hope my comments are of help.
Best regards,
Lingobernie
Hi Lingobernie,
Thanks for the tip. I will experiment with the delimiter on how to get the best split for import into Anki.
Re exporting in UTF8 format, some kind person has shown how. You Save as Type = Text (tab delimited). Then click on the Tools tab which is at the bottom just next to the Save button. Then choose Web Options - Encoding - Save this Document As - choose UTF8 from the list.
I use UTF8 for Ancient Greek and it also does Chinese - everything. It’s just amazing what Microsoft are doing!
Edit: I saw a message somewhere from Maxwell89 saying that Chinese characters weren’t appearing in Excel. You can’t just copy Chinese characters into Excel, you have to use the Text Import Wizard. Data - Get External Data From Text - On the Text Import Wizard Step 1 choose UTF8 from the File origin box. Should do it.
1 Like
That helped thanks.
I had a problem saving from Excel in UTF8 format. I ended up copying and pasting the entire spreadsheet into Notepad and saving in UTF8 from there.
Glad I can continue using Anki rather than attempting to use two flashcard review systems at once!