Recently I hit an extra digit when setting up a custom new card session and was stuck with hundreds of new cards to review. Desparate to fix this, I started poking around the Anki collection SQLite database, I found the collection data responsible for the extra cards. In the col table, find the newToday key and you’ll find the extra card count expressed as a negative integer. Just change that to zero and you’ll be good.
There’s a phenomenon that verteran Anki users are familiar with - the so-called “Anki hell” or “ease hell.”
Origins of ease hell The descent into ease hell has to do with the way Anki handles correct and incorrect answers when it presents cards for review. Ease is a numerical score associated with every card in the database and represents a valuation of the difficulty of the card. By default, when cards graduate from the learning phase, an ease of 250% is applied to the card.
In Anki 2.1, it’s practically impossible to get plain text from the web into note fields. A solution (on macOS, at least)…
Yet another diversion to keep me from focusing on actually using Anki to learn Russian. I stumbled on the R programming language, a language that focuses on statistical analysis.
Here’s a couple snippets that begin to scratch the surface of what’s possible. Important caveat: I’m an R novice at best. There are probably much better ways of doing some of this…
Counting notes with a particular model type Here we’ll use R to do what we did previously with Python.
Continuing my series on accessing the Anki database outside of the Anki application environment, here’s a piece on accessing the note type model. You may wish to start here with the first article on accessing the Anki database. This is geared toward mac OS. (If you’re not on mac OS, then start here instead.)
The note type model Since notes contain flexible fields in Anki, the model for a note type is in JSON.
I previously wrote about accessing the Anki database using Python on mac OS. Extending that post, I’ll show how to work with a specific deck in this short post.
To use a named deck you’ll need its deck ID. Fortunately there’s a built-in method for finding a deck ID by name:
col = Collection(COLLECTION_PATH) dID = col.decks.id(DECK_NAME) Now in queries against the cards and notes tables we can apply the deck ID to restrict them to a certain deck.
Not long ago I ran across this post detailing a method for opening and inspecting the Anki database using Python outside the Anki application environment. However, the approach requires linking to the Anki code base which is inaccessible on mac OS since the Python code is packaged into a Mac app on this platform.
The solution I’ve found is inelegant; but just involves downloading the Anki code base to a location on your file system where you can link to it in your code.
For the last two years, I’ve been working through a 10,000 word Russian vocabulary ordered by frequency. I have a goal of finishing the list before the end of 2019. This requires not only stubborn persistence but an efficient process of collecting the information that goes onto my Anki flash cards.
My manual process has been to work from a Numbers spreadsheet. As I collect information about each word from several websites, I log it in this table.
I wrote a piece previously about using JavaScript in Anki cards. Although I haven’t found many uses for employing this idea, it does come up from time-to-time including a recent use-case I’m writing about now.
After downloading a popular French frequency list deck for my daughter to use, I noticed that it omits the gender of nouns in the French prompt. In school, I was always taught to memorize the gender along with the noun.
As I’ve written before, I use Anki for Russian language learning. One of the skills to master in learning a foreign language is to quickly speak and recognize numbers. With a little help from macOS, I’ve developed a way of rapidly creating audible content of spoken numbers for my Anki cards.
That’s the good news. The bad news is that as of right now, you’ll have to have Xcode and build the app yourself.