Prerequisites: Yomichan – Basic functions
I hope you like reading as much as me. But occassionaly you and I, we forget the words in the text, right? No problem, we think. We just have to lookup the word once in a dictionary and we are fine. But if you use Anki this induces a lot of problems: The vocabulary is not added to your Anki deck. Or if you have an Anki card for the word already, this card isn’t answered as incorrect whenever you look it up.
In this post I will provide a solution for these problems. Yomichan is already tightly coupled to Anki. Nevertheless a card should not be answered as incorrect as soon as you look it up. First, it might be counter-intuitive for those who want to use Yomichan only for creating new cards. Second, when you look up a word there might be multiple definitions and it’s not possible to programmatically choose the right one:
The solution requires a bit more work from us. As first step we have to turn a normal text file into a Yomichan deck. And as second step we read the entire file and all looked up words shall be answered as incorrect.
For this guide we take the first 2 sentences from ノルウェイの森 as example. If you want more, you can get the text copy-paste ready from ノルウェーの森 第一章.
Turn a text into a Yomichan deck
- If you have Yomichan already opened, close it. Open Yomichan in a “clean state” in Anki by just pressing Ctrl-Y.
- Copy the text you want to read into Yomichan:
僕は三十七歳で、そのときボーイング747のシートに座っていた。その巨大な飛行機はぶ厚い雨雲をくぐり抜けて降下し、ハンブルク空港に着陸しようとしているところだった。
and do some formatting if necessary, e.g. making line breaks after every 。
- Add all interesting words to Anki that you can find. Not interesting words would be いる,その and similar super-easy words. You should end up with something like this (note the words in the Anki panel to the left):
- Press Ctrl-S and save the file somewhere in the Yomichan subdirectory, e.g. as collection.media\Yomichan\NoruweiNoMori\1.1.txt
- Close Yomichan.
Press once on “Decks” on the top. Now you should be able to see an automagically created Yomichan deck called 1.1.txt:
The green number there shows how many cards are due in this deck. This helps to choose a proper text later when you want to re-read old texts.
Re-read a Yomichan deck
- Click once on the Yomichan deck (e.g. on 1.1.txt) in the deck browser. This will open the corresponding file in Yomichan
- Now read the text slowly again and simply look up any word that you have forgotten.
- Click once on Learn vocabulary. This button answers all known words as correct and all forgotten words as incorrect.
Re-learn text-specific vocabulary outside of Yomichan
- Press F while in Anki to create a filtered deck. If you want to review all due cards in any ノルウェイの森-text, you can write as search query:
deck:”Yomichan::NoruweiNoMori” (is:due)
- Rename the Custom Study Session-deck afterwards to something like Japanese::NoruweiNoMori
- Rebuild the deck before you review it, so that the proper cards are placed into it.
Exporting Yomichan decks
You want to share your Yomichan decks so that other people can use it immediately, without the need of adding every single word manually? Just upload the .txt file somewhere in the internet (e.g. on http://www.pastebin.com – give your friends the raw link which they can save as .txt file in the collection.media\Yomichan folder by presssing Ctrl+S). I have the beginning of ノルウェイの森’s chapter 2 exported: 2.1.txt, 2.2.txt, 2.3.txt, 2.4.txt As soon as you open such a Yomichan deck once in Anki, all new cards are created.
Additional tricks
- If you accidently looked up a word – and you don’t want it to be answered as incorrect – press Alt+R. It’s only possible for the last looked up word though.
- If you want to practice some English->Japanese as well for certain words, then you can replace single Japanese words with an English equivalent. To do so, lookup the word you want to replace and press Alt+W. Now type in the English word. E.g. you can replace ぶ厚い with bulky. Make sure to save any changes!
