Yomichan – Basic functions

I believe that the Anki plugin “Yomichan” is by far the best thing ever invented, and not only because I am actively developing it at the moment. This plugin is guaranteed to boost your reading speed, your vocabulary and, if you want, your listening comprehension! I want to credit Alex Yatskov at this point, the original developer of this plugin. You can find his website and what he has to write about Yomichan on http://foosoft.net/projects/yomichan/. Here I will explain the most basic functions of Yomichan, which are looking up definitions and creating Anki cards.

Installing Yomichan

1. First of all, download Anki from http://ankisrs.net/
2. After you have installed and opened it, click in the program on Tools -> Add-Ons -> Browse&Install. Enter the number 907186589 there. That’s the ID of this neat plugin
3. Restart Anki

Setting up Yomichan

1. To open Yomichan press ctrl+Y
2. There click on Edit -> Preferences. You should see the following window
   For now, only the Lookup key is important. Here it is F1, which is working fine for me, but you have a few choices here. That’s the key with which you can lookup definition of words.
3. If you click on the Anki tab in the preferences, you will get:
   
   This window describes how new notes will be created. It is confusing on the first look, but the default values here should be already fine for standard usage. The target deck can be selected next to “Deck”. The different fields can be filled with any text and even HTML. By adding tags, like {expression}, you can add different parts of the definition to the note. Be sure to check “Put new/overwritten cards into the learning queue”, if you want to learn the added cards immediately (there is no reason not to!)
4. Click on Ok

Looking up Definitions

In order to look up definitions, hover your mouse over the first letter of the word that you want to look up and then press the Lookup Key (which is F1 for me). If you are unsure where a word starts, just hover over all letters and lookup the words. Usually the longest words are the correct ones. If you can’t see the definition, you might need to toggle it on (View -> Vocabulary).

Creating cards

A screenshot of Yomichan and its most important fields

1. Name of the opened text file
2. Editor field
3. Vocabulary panel – here the definitions show up
4. By clicking on the green or blue button, you add a card to your Anki deck. The blue button is an indicator that such a card exists already. Clicking on a blue button overwrites the existing card. The tags will be set as follows (assumed you add the word 降り出す)
   • {expression}: 降り出す, if you click on the big button and ふりだす if you click on the small button (Hiragana-only)
   • {reading}: ふりだす, or nothing if you click on the small button
   • {summary}: 降り出す[ふりだす], if you click on the big button and ふりだす if you click on the small button (Hiragana-only)
   • {glossary}: (v5s,vi) to begin to rain; to begin to snow
   • {line}: 降り出す前一瞬の
   • {sentence}: 降り出す前一瞬の 冷たい風に言った 「寂しいの。だから少しだけ話を聞いて」って 夜が少し近付く度 あなたのことが浮かんだ どうか私を連れ去って走ってよ ただ夜汽車は走る あなたの頬を触るまで もう一度触れたら諦めるから あなたは忘れたと 思うけどまだ会いたいの 待っててと叫ぶ声はどこかに こうやってる間にもさ 喧嘩した部屋では別の 時間を過ごしてるんでしょ？ – this doesn’t work well with lyrics, because punctuation is missing.
   • {filename}: indigo la End 「夜汽車は走る」.txt
   • {t0}, ({t1}, …): the first (second, …) tab-separated field in the current line – useful if you have tab-separated files
5. Link to the jisho definition of the word (here: http://jisho.org/search/降り出す)
6. Kanji panel – the same as for vocabulary, just with the kanjis listed
7. Added vocabulary – by double-clicking on a word here, you get to the correct entry in the deck browser. Here you can manually edit the card, if you want
8. Do not touch these buttons! They are very sensible! I will cover their awesome features in the next article.

Well, that’s it for now! I expect you to know how to find the definitions of words and add notes to Anki now. The next article will cover how we can use this plugin to train reading and listening comprehension.