Has any one here used Anki? What is your experience? I exported 100 words out of LingQ and tried to import the list into Anki but somehow Anki keeps on telling me that I have finished, even though I haven’t started. Any ideas?
I use Anki for Chinese. Both for characters (keyword on the front, have to draw the character which is on the back) and for sentences (read the sentence out loud, test your understanding, by checking the meaning on the back). It reduces the torment of learning to read Chinese by a CONSIDERABLE percentage, since the program determines the rate at which I see cards again according the ranking which I provide myself. It’s like a cooperative way to retain information.
I know some people don’t favour the sentence method, but it’s never to memorize sentences, just to understand them. The vocabulary, grammar and context are all provide in little packages. It really is a marvelous tool.
Steve, I’m not sure what’s going on, but if you click the magnifying glass icon, you should be able to see all your cards listed there. And if they’re there, they should be showing up in reviews. Could you possibly post a screenshot?
I absolutely love Anki. It helps with understanding sentences a lot better and in short doses. I have actually been importing anything that is difficult to remember in terms of sentences and throw it into Anki. Once you have memorized what you need to know. Anki will make sure you only review things that you have probably forgotten. In the short term you do not really see any benefit, but in the long term it works great for retention.
I think Anki has a setting where you can rank any imported items. So, your imported items might be ranked as known, and therefore not ready for review yet. If you open the deck though, and click on the graph, you can see when future reviews are scheduled. Or, if you see the command “review early”, then the deck is probably working, and the items are ranked as known and not ready for review.
Does LingQ export only a pure wordlist or does it also export data about the words’ review history?
Other than that, I mostly use Anki for its premade decks. I still use Mnemosyne for the decks I make myself.
And, to add a question to this:
Does anyone know how to combine decks on Anki? I don’t like having lots of different decks. I’d prefer to combine them into one master deck.
Copied and pasted right from the official anki faq:
How can I merge or split decks?
Use File>Import to import another deck into the current deck. Use File>Export to export your deck to a different file. You can use the ‘limit to tags’ option to export only part of your deck to the other file.
Ah, thanks. Must have missed that somehow.
I like anki and I use it every day. I really like that you can add an mp3 audio track to the “cards” and that you can choose the length of time before your next review based on how well you knew the answer. You can also tag the cards to group them or sort them, add pictures and automatically generate cards with your question and answer reversed. There is a special 3 sided format for adding the hiragana pronunciation for Japanese (which is automatically generated), Chinese support, and as mentioned above, many premade decks that are shared among users. I don’t use these myself but I can see that they could be helpful if you don’t like to make cards. I have heard that it can be used on the iphone and that there is a syncing feature to save your decks and sync them with the website but I don’t use these features either. I just use it to make up and review cards with audio attached and to review my cards with an SRS algorithm based on how well I know the answer to set the spacing. I tried Vtrain, supermemory, mnemosyne, vocabuIary master, kanjikoohi, and even the LingQ flashcards and so far, I think anki really meets my needs the best.
One other flashcard software that I have found interesting for Japanese (it is also for Chinese) writing is Skritter. It has a handwriting recognition analyser attached to a flashcard program so you can write the character, I am using a Wacom pen tablet but it also recognized mouse movements, and the software will recognize and help you to remember stroke order and also lets you choose how well you knew the character to set the next review time delay. I also use kanji koohi to help me with learning the kanji which s good for helping with the mnemonics to remember the characters, has a great forum, but is not as fun to use as skritter. If you are studying kanji or hanzi and haven’t seen this, it is worth checking it out.
I tried to use it in combination with Heisigs “Remembering the Kanji”
what I didn’t like about anki is that you can’t go “at your own pace” - that is select the things “up to the point” that you have learned
I ended up printing out the flash cards and using em that way. Already Learnt about 125 kanji (3-4days). I use “learnt” here somewhat loosely - as 90-95% correctness. So far “Remembering the Kanji” is awesome and I am actually addicted 
jbudding - yeah graphics tablets are awesome! I have a Genius Pensketch 9x12 (A4-size drawing area). best 100usd I ever spent.
I checked out Skritter but it’s a non-free service
There is workaround for that. Order by “Created”, highlight all the words you’ve seen (it’s easier if they are sorted chronologically, since the program probably is set to test you on new cards in that order) and finally choose “cram”. Then you can review those words as much as you want.
Remember that the idea behind SRS is to save time, and you don’t save time if you review everything everyday. You can however change a lot of settings in Settings->Study options.