Using Anki with Smart.fm

Anki is an awesome space repetition system ( clever flash cards.). I use it everyday to review the Japanese I'm learning. One question a beginner may ask is "Where do I get good sentences to use with Anki?"

smart.fm is the answer. It has over 10,000 sentences with a picture and a sound file. It also has it's own online learning system. I prefer to use Anki, because I can use it offline and it's under my control)

My method



This the way I add cards. It probably requires the use of firefox. There are plugins for anki that allow mass importation of smart.fm cards - but they don't include the picture for copyright reasons. My way you get everything.

I open anki and select 'add new card'.



This brings up the add card window



Then I find out what sentence I'm up to in smart.fm.


Then I copy the text to anki - pretty obvious right? I set the English text to white, so I can only view it by highlighting. I want to minimize the amount of non-Japanese material I'm exposed to, while reviewing.



Next the image, I hover the mouse over image and hold down the left mouse button. Then holding the left mouse button down, I drag the image way down to the task bar. Then I hover over the anki taskbar icon.



After 1 or 2 seconds the anki window will be activated. So then I drag the image up to anki and finally release the mouse button. The images are a bit big, but they look fine when I review :D



Next the sound. I right click the blue sound icon and say copy url.



Then I paste that link into the firefox url bar and press enter.


This causes firefox to automatically download the mp3 file. So I go to firefox's download window


I right click on the file I've downloaded and selected "Open Download Location". This opens a folder with the mp3 file highlighted.



I drag the mp3 to the task bar like I did for the image. Hover over the anki task bar icon and then drag and drop the mp3 file into anki. This plays the file and adds some data to the textbox.



Then I add the card. This probably takes me 5 seconds or so per card.

11 comments:

Tibul said...

Pretty much the same as what I do although i usually don't bother with the pictures and audio even though it might make some of the more difficult ones easier to remember.

balaam said...

I tend to add pictures for all cards I make. I just copy part of the sentence and put it into google image search, then drag and drop the picture :D

Recently smart.fm hasn't been stable enough for me to use, so I'm going through the last part of Understanding Basic Japanese Grammar.

Tibul said...

I was also thinking of going through all of UBJG and the All about particles book I have them but only ever taken a few sentences from them so far.

balaam said...

I think you probably already know, but on the RTK forums there's a thread about UBJG.

There's a link somewhere in it to a google spread sheet that has all the UBJG sentences written out.

You may have to get permission to view it though, I can't remember.

Joe S said...

Nice article. But there's a much, much easier way to get smart.fm sentences (and/or vocab) into Anki. Use a plugin!

Take a look at the smart.fm plugin for Anki here:
http://ichi2.net/anki/wiki/Plugins#Importsmart.fmitems.2Candgenerallists

With the latest Anki release, you can also download using Anki's built in plugin manager. The plugin provides full control over what card types are created.

balaam said...

I thought that the plugin didn't include the picture.

I did the above up chapter 7 of the core 2000. Then I found someone who had a premade anki deck. So from there on I just imported each chapter - this let me complete it much much faster :D

Joe S said...

The plugin does include the picture - through an HTML link. As long as you have internet access you'll see the picture. That's 99% of the time for most of us, right?

サイ said...

how did you get your XP into Japanese? Did you have to buy a Japanese version on eBay or something?

balaam said...

When I was at University we were a Microsoft special partner or someting, so I could download any Microsoft software I wanted.

Installing it on a netbook with no cdrom drive was tricker! :) There's some software that lets you use a CD image from a usb stick.

Jack said...

For the audio, just copy the URL and paste it into the audio box in Anki. It converts it into Anki file format automagically!

Jack said...

For the audio, just copy the URL and paste it into the Anki audio field. It gets converted into Anki file format automagically!