Tag: anki

An Anki card with a note image and a template image.

Top Three Gamification Plugins for Anki

If you’re committed to mastering a new language, you already know the power of Anki’s spaced repetition system and its range of fantastic, functional add-ons like Review Heatmap.

But let’s face it—purely functional flashcards can sometimes feel monotonous. That’s where gamification plugins come in, introducing arcade-style elements into your study sessions to transform them into engaging, motivating experiences.

Below, I’ve pulled together three perhaps lesser-proselytised entries from the plug-in cache that introduce a, well, off-the-wall element to your card reviews. Think kawaii rather than cahier. Yes, they are a little whacky. But there’s often method in language learning madness, and these are all great fun as well as being squarely aimed at increasing your motivation.

Let the fun begin!

1. POKEMANKI – Strategic Learning Meets Fun

Pokemanki ingeniously blends language learning with the mechanics of Pokémon, turning your Anki reviews into a game where you hatch eggs, train Pokémon, and climb leaderboards. With over 30,000 downloads, it’s a clear favorite among learners who appreciate its strategic depth and nostalgic appeal.  If you’re looking for a plugin that combines fun with serious progress, this is an excellent choice.

Download Pokemanki here.

2. ANKIMON – Catch ‘Em All, Pokémon-Style

OK, there’s a theme emerging here… and it’s perhaps not surprising, judging by how many of my polyglot pals are also into Pokémon. Ankimon takes gamification to the next level by turning your Anki reviews into a full Pokémon adventure. As you review cards, you catch, train, and trade Pokémon, competing with others online. With over 15,000 downloads, it’s a hit among learners who thrive on immersive gameplay. If you’re a Pokémon fan looking to inject excitement into your language learning, this plugin is a must-try.

Download Ankimon here.

3. ANKITTY – Simple, Effective Motivation

Sometimes, the simplest incentives are the most motivating and fun. Kitten Rewards displays charming kitten images on your “congrats” screen after completing a deck, offering a small but effective boost. With over 10,000 downloads, it’s a popular choice for learners seeking a low-pressure, low-key way to stay engaged. If you appreciate subtle, positive reinforcement (and love kittens), this plugin is worth exploring.

Download Ankitty here. Alternatively, for doggie fans, there’s this puppy alternative!

Final Thoughts

Gamification isn’t just about enjoyment—it’s about leveraging psychology to sustain your language-learning momentum. Whether you’re strategising with Pokemanki, tracking progress and hatching eggs with Ankimon, or enjoying the small joys of Kitten Rewards, these plugins can transform your Anki experience into something quite unique.

Choose the one that best aligns with your learning style, and take your language skills to the next level. Happy studying, polyglots!

Multiple language decks in Anki

Top Anki Plug-Ins, 2025 Edition

I recently sang the praises of the Anki Heat Map plug-in, which has been a great motivator and accountability pal for me. It’s one amongst many Anki add-ons, and one that’s been around at least as long as I’ve been using the app (and that’s a long time!).

The beauty of Anki is its extensibility, of course. And while we’re revisiting some trusty old plug-ins like Heat Map, it’s worth surveying the current field again.

Here are five standout plug-ins for language learners still going strong in 2025.

HYPERTTS – Add Speech to Your Flashcards

Enhance your pronunciation and listening skills by integrating native speaker audio into your flashcards.

HyperTTS allows users to add high-quality text-to-speech audio to their cards, covering a wide range of languages. This is particularly beneficial for practicing pronunciation and improving listening comprehension.

IMAGE OCCLUSION ENHANCED

Transform complex images into interactive flashcards.

Ideal for visual learners, this plug-in lets you hide parts of an image to test your recall. Whether it’s vocabulary lists, grammar structures, or cultural visuals, Image Occlusion Enhanced makes memorisation engaging.

LANGUAGE TOOLS

Automate translations and transliterations within your flashcards.

Language Tools brings automated translation support for 133 languages and transliteration in 33 languages directly into Anki. This is particularly useful for learners dealing with multiple languages or scripts, streamlining the creation of comprehensive flashcards. 

ADVANCED BROWSER

Streamline your card management with enhanced search and organization features.

The Advanced Browser plug-in offers additional search parameters and sorting options, making it easier to manage large decks. You can filter cards by various criteria, ensuring efficient study sessions. Definitely one of those ‘I never knew I needed it until I had it!’ plug-ins.

ANKICOLLAB – The Free Collaboration Platform

Collaborate with fellow learners to create and share decks.

AnkiCollab enables users to work together on deck creation, allowing for shared insights and resources. It’s a valuable tool for community-driven learning and expanding your study materials.

All these plug-ins come with some prestige and history, having been around for a while. In other words, they’ve proven their worth to countless users already. Incorporating any of them can transform your Anki experience, making language learning more interactive, efficient, enjoyable, and even more sociable.

Happy studying!

Anki Heat Maps – Honesty Corner

When it comes to building and reviewing habits, honesty is the best policy. And there’s one Anki plug-in that has been that tough-talking, truth-speaking friend I’ve needed over the years.

Review heat map has been going for as long as I’ve been using Anki (and that’s a long time already!). I think it was a German conversation partner on iTalki who pointed me in its direction originally – it was so long ago, that that origin story is lost in the mists of time.

But because of that admirable length of service, I have years of usage data in there – and it really shines a light on my consistency (or lack thereof) in that time.

Anki Honesty

I’d not looked at mine in a while – in the desktop app they’re hiding below your decks – so it was about time to check in. And while I knew I’d been a bit on and off in 2024 (preparing for a PhD was a slight distraction!), I didn’t realise I’d been quite so neglectful.

Anki heat maps over time

Anki heat maps over time

It’s not all bad, though. There’s actually something very encouraging about this. Progress is bitty, yes; but it never stops completely. A couple of times, I’ve had over two weeks without checking in. But I’ve always got back into it (usually in a mammoth catch-up sesh, working through 200+ cards – although even those catch-ups took perhaps just 10-15 minutes each).

Taking stock like this also serves as a motivational kick – I can do better. And so it’s back in my goals list for 2025 – make Anki part of the start of your day. Getting a year completely blued out, like 2021, will be so satisfying.

Know Yourself

Heat maps can show us that sometimes, we fail to take our own advice. We fall off the wagon. It’s clear that there are times that I repeatedly let my daily tactics slide, despite my own efficiency evangelism!

That said, knowledge is power. Looking over those heat maps, I see when those times of slippage occur. Without fail, they’re always times of being over-busy, stressed out, or – conversely – times of extreme leisure (think: holidays!). More than anything, the stops and starts in my heat maps show that life sometimes gets in the way.

But you can always get it back on track.

Review Heat Map is a pretty essential addition to your Anki toolbox, to my mind. And it’s available for free from the Anki plug-ins site!

Lots of Flashcards floating down from buildings to the street below

Mastering Verbs with Anki: A Step-by-Step Guide

Verb conjugation is a sticking point for many language learners at some point. Of course, some languages let us off the hook with minimal paradigms, like Chinese, or Norwegian. As for the rest of them, there’s no getting around endings, stem changes, auxiliaries and the like.

Memorising entire conjugation tables by rote might work as an overview. But retaining reams of conjugation tables in memory, then using them naturally in context, is a different story.

That’s where Anki can help. By customising your cards to include not only disembodied parts, but also real-world, conjugated, in-use examples, verb drills will be less wading through treacle and more in-the-moment fast recall.

Here’s how.

Custom fields for verbs

It’s all about customising your note types to contain contextualising info, and not just a simple dictionary form and translation. A good ‘verb note’ should probably contain the main dictionary elements – infinitive, simple past and past participle, for example – but also a space for a sample sentence (or several, if you like).

To add these custom fields to a note type in Anki, start by opening the Manage Note Types menu. You can find this by clicking Tools > Manage Note Types in the top menu. Choose an existing note type you want to customise (or create a new one by clicking Add) and select Fields. In the fields editor, you can add new fields by clicking Add and giving the field a name, such as “Dictionary Form,” “Conjugated Sentence,” or “Notes.”

Making a custom note type for verbs in Anki

After you’ve done that, you can start adding items to your decks in this new format.

Adding an Anki card using a custom note type for verbs

We’re not quite done yet, though. Your new, custom note is up and running in terms of storing data – just not displaying it in cards, yet.

To include these fields on your flashcards, hit the Browse link in main Anki window, select the note type in the left-hand menu, then edit the card templates by selecting Cards in the right-hand pane. Insert your named fields into the template using curly braces, e.g., {{Dictionary Form}} or {{Sample Sentence}}. You can use basic HTML to style your data, too.

Customising a card view to use a new note type specifically for German verbs

Experiment with different strategies for where you place the info. The front side might contain just the English prompt, with the target language all on the flip side. Alternatively, you might want to keep your cards solely in the target language, with the infinitive on one side, and the parts / context material on the back.

Form and Use

The beauty of the customised note types approach is that a deck can contain multiple types. So, for verbs, enter your vocab using the note type created in the steps above. For other items like nouns, adjectives and so on, add using a basic card. Either that, or customise for those parts of speech, too – there’s no limit!

Mastering irregular verbs is all about context. Anki gives you the tools to leverage context in any way you please, through its extensive customisation tools. By taking advantage of Anki’s spaced repetition when learning verbs in full sentences, you’ll not only memorise their forms, but also their use. It’s especially effective when you make Anki cards one of your daily tactics.

Ready to take control of your verbs? Start building your deck today, and let Anki do the heavy lifting!

A collage of lots of word and picture cards.

Treating Leeches – Strategies for Suspended Anki Cards

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How do you deal with leeches?

I’m not talking about traditional medicine here (not to downplay the modern application of the age-old treatment at all!). The leeches I’m more concerned with on the day-to-day are those Anki cards you forget so persistently that the app takes charge, suspending them from your deck.

It’s an apt description for an item that sucks away your time and motivation. I don’t know about you, but I also get that sinking feeling of failure when “card was a leech” pops up baldly.

Catching Leeches

First of all, fight that feeling. Leeches can creep up for a number of reasons, and your memory lapse is the least of them. Despite the cold rebuke, Anki means well. It suspends the cards to save you wasting any more time on part of your learning strategy that isn’t quite working. So, for now, let them go.

Instead, schedule a review of leeches regularly. Once a month or so seems about right if you’re a prolific language learning user – I always have a couple to deal with in that time span. In the Anki desktop app, head to Browse. Then, there are two ways to list leeches. You can simply highlight Suspended under Card State in the left-hand menu.

Exposing leeches via Suspended Cards in the Anki Browse window

Exposing leeches via Suspended Cards in the Anki Browse window

Otherwise, you can use the fact that Anki tags leech cards with the text leech to draw them out. Highlight one of your decks in the left-hand menu, then in the bar at the top of the Browse panel, add the text tag:leech to narrow the results to that set.

Exposing leeches via tags in the Anki Browse window

Exposing leeches via tags in the Anki Browse window

Now out in the open, we need to think of a rehabilitation strategy for our annoyingly helpful leeches.

Treating the Cause, Not the Problem

It’s tempting to just un-suspend by removing that leech tag, and pop the card right back in the deck. But there’s a reason Anki singled it out – something wasn’t working.

Often, it’s not simply failure to remember. Many of mine aren’t words I’ve forgotten, but words I get mixed up – either with other target language words, or with the wrong English translation. For example, in Greek, I leeched out παραδέχομαι (paradéchomai – admit) with αποδέχομαι (apodéchomai – accept), due to their similarity – same root verb, different prefix.

It’s not always just soundalikes, either, but happens with concepts. Left and right are a case in point in Swahili. I know both words very well – kushoto and kulia – but I’d always say one for the other, to the point that they were marked as leeches.

I could recall them – it had just become 50/50 whether I’d say one or the other!

These cases of interference usually arises because there’s a lack of distinguishing information on the vocab card. The easiest way to fix that is to make your cards clearer and more precise. Any defining detail will do, and with language learning, context is key. Short sentences that embed the vocabulary items are perfect. To give the brain more to hang onto, you can expand them from basic X is Y types to X is Y, so/because…, and even make use of allegory and rhyme in your examples.

Taking the Swahili example, there’s a topical hook with those that adds layers of meaning: politics. There’s also a good rhyme for kulia in pia (also). So to my card, I add the sentence (and forgive the unpalatable mention of unpopular politicians here) Boris yuko kulia, na Rishi pia (Boris is on the right, and Rishi too).

And (of course) there’s a wee AI tip for that. If you struggle to fine rhymes – not unreasonable if you’re at an early stage in a language – then just ask your LLM of choice for rhyming pointers, or even entire couplets. It’s one of the things is does a pretty decent job of!

Asking AI for rhyming words in foreign languages.

Asking ChatGPT-4 for rhyming words in foreign languages.

 

 

Leeches are an initially frustrating but ultimately helping feature of the Anki lifestyle! Do you have alternative methods for bashing them? Let us know in the comments!

A deck of neon flashcards. Anki cards might not be quite as fancy!

From ChatGPT to Anki : Instant Potted Vocab Decks!

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With cutting edge AI galvanising the language learning world, traditional tools like Anki – which would have been considered the leading edge not that long ago – seem well in the shade. But it’s not a question of either-or. Traditional and new tech can work in happy symbiosis to support language learning.

Preparing for a recent high-stakes language mission (OK, island-hopping hol!) to Greece, I wanted to turboboost my Greek vocab. Anki was my tool of choice, of course, but one question remained: where to source new flashcard decks? Large Language Models like ChatGPT and Bing were easy choices for generating topical vocab lists, but how much copy-pasting would that involve? I wasn’t keen on spending hours formatting cards manually.

Thankfully, ChatGPT Plus’ Advanced Data Analysis mode can provide a bridge between old and new. Forget that slightly intimidating title – the main boon is simply that this mode can output a text file. And, given the right format, Anki can take such a text file as an import source. With a bit of prompting prowess, we can automate the whole process – from topic to cards, in one fell swoop. Before long, I had a fresh daily drip-drip of new words and phrases, a real shot in the arm for my Greek pre-trip.

Here’s how to task ChatGPT with the whole job of Anki deck creation. If you don’t have the Plus version, no problem – scroll down for a modified version that works with completely free plans and services!

Automatic Anki Decks – Plus Style

First of all, start a new chat in ChatGPT, and make sure Advanced Data Analysis is selected in the drop-down menu under ChatGPT-4.

Selecting Advanced Data Analysis mode in ChatGPT-4.

Selecting Advanced Data Analysis mode in ChatGPT-4.

Now, we’re ready for our prompt. Like our AI speaking prep worksheets, the beauty of this is just how specific you can make your flashcards. The topic can be as broad or narrow as you like. Here’s a sample prompt to create a French deck on the talking point ‘social issues’:

Hello! I’m learning French, and I’d like you to create an Anki flashcard deck to help me. To import a deck, Anki requires a CSV file format with just a “Front”, “Back” and “Tags” field corresponding to the English. the target language phrase and the part of speech. There is no need for header fields, so the first line should represent the first vocabulary item.
Can you create such an Anki-ready list of 50 flashcard items on the topic “Social Issues” for me, then save it for me as a .txt file I can import into the app?
– Provide a good mixture of essential and useful nouns, verbs, adjectives, and useful phrases / sentence frames (ie., so it’s not just a list of nouns!).
– Provide each term in its dictionary form if appropriate, indicating gender, plural and essential or irregular parts briefly as per convention where applicable.
– Ensure that all terms relate to the contemporary culture of the target language country as much as possible.
– Please draw on resources in the original target language when researching which words will be most useful, cross-referencing with all available data and checking constantly to make sure that the target language for the flashcards is accurate and colloquial, never bookish or unnatural.

Limitations (For Now)

One limitation with the Advanced Data Analysis mode is that it can’t run concurrently with ChatGPT’s now restored web-connected mode, or Browse with Bing. All that means is that it will be relying on its banks of training data for the vocab collation, rather than the web. But in most cases, it shouldn’t make too much difference given the vastness of that data (although it will notify you apologetically about it – see below). We’re waiting for the day – hopefully soon – that OpenAI allows users to run several premium features together.

ChatGPT Plus whirring away creating an Anki deck.

ChatGPT Plus whirring away at an Anki deck. Quirky repartee not as standard, but provided by special request thanks to custom instructions! I like my AI cheeky.

Into Anki We Go

One you have your ChatGPT-infused vocab file ready, you can import it straight into Anki. In the Anki desktop app, head to File > Import, and select the file you saved. The import settings window will pop up, including, crucially, which field matches to which column of your data under Field Mapping. The app guesses correctly for the most part, but occasionally you may need to specify that the third column (part of speech) maps to the tags field.

Importing CSV data into Anki decks.

Importing CSV data into Anki decks.

And that’s it. You should get a brief report of the number of items added, and they’re ready to play with straight away. Instant, fresh vocab decks in seconds!

No ChatGPT Plus? No problem!

Now, the above is all very well if you have ChatGPT Plus. Many platforms lack the file output side of things. But you can still get them do the heavy work of vocab-hunting and file-formatting; all you need to do is the final copy-paste-save.

Here’s how to alter the prompt for plain old vanilla ChatGPT and Bing, coaxing it to provide Anki-ready output. I’ve also made the format a little clearer, which might help if you’re using slightly older models like ChatGPT-3.5.

Hello! I’m learning French, and I’d like you to create an Anki flashcard deck to help me. To import a deck, Anki requires a CSV file format with just a “Front”, “Back” and “Tags” field corresponding to the English. the target language phrase and the part of speech.
Can you create such an Anki-ready list of 25 flashcard items on the topic “Driving a Car” for me? Output the CSV data as formatted as code so I can easily copy-paste into a text file for Anki.
– Don’t include header fields in the CSV – the first line of your output should be the first vocabulary item (ie., car,la voiture,noun).
– Provide a good mixture of essential and useful nouns, verbs, adjectives, and useful phrases / sentence frames (ie., so it’s not just a list of nouns!).
– Provide each term in its dictionary form if appropriate, indicating gender, plural and essential or irregular parts briefly as per convention where applicable.
– Ensure that all terms relate to the contemporary culture of the target language country as much as possible.
– Please draw on resources in the original target language when researching which words will be most useful, cross-referencing with all available data and checking constantly to make sure that the target language for the flashcards is accurate and colloquial, never bookish or unnatural.

Your platform should spool out some easily copiable code. Simply paste this into a text file, save, and import into Anki.

Even using 3.5, I got some great results featuring practical, useful vocabulary sets.

Creating Anki decks with the free ChatGPT3.5 model.

Creating Anki decks with the free ChatGPT3.5 model.

Experiment, Experiment, Experiment!

As with all AI prompts, it’s worth experimenting with everything to tweak, improve and get the absolute best out of it. The number of cards, the mix of words and phrases, the source of the material – make it your own. When you have it just right, you can create cards for your own, or your students’ learning, in seconds.

Oh, and don’t forget to save your perfect prompts somewhere you can copy-paste them from later, too!

If you’re keen for more artificial intelligence tips to boost your learning, please check out my book AI for Language Learners. It’s packed with practical examples to fuel your linguistic adventures!

Anki Enhanced Cloze

“Cloze” to Perfect : Extending Anki’s Gapfill Activities

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Ever had that realisation that there was a better way to do what you doing all along, one hiding under your nose the whole time? Well, that was my week of epiphany with Anki.

Anki has included cloze functionality pretty much from the get-go. If you’ve not come across cloze before, it’s basically fill-in-the-missing-word. Your card pops up, and instead of providing the whole answer, you just recall the missing section.

Cloze is a great tool in your learning box to ward against the isolation issue with vocab. Learning items in context is just as (if not more) important than learning individual items. If you drill ich habe einen Hund (I have a dog) in German, you’ll not only pick up Hund, but a handy sentence frame and grammatical information to boot. Vocab plus structure is always a winning combo (and why mass sentence drilling is so powerful).

Native Cloze in Anki

Anki’s native cloze capabilities are simple enough to use. To make a cloze card, you simply type in your sentence with the gapped words surrounded by braces, along with a special tag to signify the gap:

Ich habe einen {c1::Hund}.

In the toolbar, there’s even a button to do this for you – just highlight your word to gap, and click […].

There are even some extra tricks in there, right out of the box. For instance, you can add a hint that appears in the blank before you guess:

Ich habe einen {c1::Hund::noun}.

You can add several gaps, or sets of gaps. For instance, if you change a couple of them to c2 instead of c1, they’ll be treated as separate question sets:

Ich {c1::habe} einen {c1::Hund} und er {c2::ist} sehr {c2::lustig}!

When you come to test them, the c1 and c2 words will appear on separate cards. Really handy to drill more complex material.

As great as it is, though, it’s not perfect. For one thing, Anki hides and shows all your grouped gaps at once. Not great if you have two or three gaps on one card, and want to test your recall of them in their own right, rather than in one fell swoop.

Enhanced Cloze

Thankfully, the Anki Open Source community comes to the rescue. Anki Enhanced Cloze retains all the native functionality that Anki already did so well. But it also allows for individual hide/show within a set, adds a number of useful extra fields, a main/pseudo cloze distinction and some much nicer formatting.

A screenshot of a learning flashcard made with Anki Enhanced Cloze

Anki Enhanced Cloze

The resulting card is so much more flexible for self-testing, and looks much nicer, too. And the best thing? Card creation follows exactly the same method as Anki’s native cloze, along with the extra little hint trick. It’s a very quick way to make your cloze cards a lot more effective.

Needless to say, I’ll be spending some time this week converting my older cloze cards to the newer format. It’s one of those cases where a better way of doing things was hiding under my nose the whole time – the add-on has been around since 2021. Ah well – better late than never!

An egg frying in a non-stick frying pan (image by freeimages.com). How do you ensure your vocabulary doesn't stick together?

Non-Stick Vocabulary : Separating Similar Words

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We’ve all been there in the early stages of language learning. Somehow, certain words just seem to blend into each other. Does X mean Y or Z? I keep saying X for Y! And why do all those little words look so similar? You want your vocabulary to stick in your mind, not the individual items to stick together. 

These recall problems are pretty normal, particularly when you throw in the social pressure of speaking with others, which can even mess with your native language. With a foreign language, the problem is compounded by differences in phonemic salience – that is., which sounds count as important markers to distinguish one word from another. Something really subtle in your native language, like the difference between a hard stop and a palatalised counterpart, can completely change a meaning. Take the pair of words adabu (good manners) and ajabu (wonder, amazement) in Swahili. When I started Swahili classes, I could not separate them in my head for the life of me. It’s likely that my brain just found it tricky to meaningfully separate the sounds represented by d and j, as /d/ often morphs into /dj/ in my native dialect (try saying induce or and you).

Other times, words might get sticky because they share similar structures that co-trigger, like rhyming sequences. That would explain why I also found it tricky to separate the word asali (honey) from the previous two. Latching onto that aXa pattern, it somehow ended up occupying a very similar memory space to adabu and ajabu. And of course, it probably didn’t help that you spell all three with just five letters! It’s the cost-economising (read: lazy) part of the brain spotting patterns and making heuristic shortcuts – even when these are very unhelpful. Tsk. (Incidentally, the brilliant Daniel Kahneman writes about dodgy heuristics in Thinking, Fast and Slow, which is well worth a read if this piques your interest!)

Revisiting Vocabulary

Interestingly, it’s an effect that isn’t confined to brand new languages. It can even happen with old languages we’re dredging up from the past, or low-level maintaining.

Hebrew is one of those for me. It’s not quite a maintenance language; in fact, I can barely even count it as a fully-fledged language of mine. I barely reached A1 in the modern, spoken language, so it doesn’t take a lot of maintaining. I keep it in that list, chiefly, for reasons of nostalgia!

Anyway, a couple of years ago, I sought to do that minimal maintenance a bit more systematically. I grabbed my copy of Routledge’s Colloquial Hebrew, trawled the first six chapters for vocabulary, and dumped it into Anki. I set my Hebrew deck to drip through a single new card a day, and just let time do the rest.

Overall, it’s been a brilliant, low-key method for solidifying all that ultra-basic stuff. But, every now and again, I do struggle to recall certain words. And surprise, surprise, it’s usually those that look a little bit similar to others. It’s adabu-ajabu all over again!

Seeing it through Anki eyes gave me a new perspective on it, though. In test mode, mix-ups are largely artefacts of the isolated vocabulary item problem. It crops up time and time again in polyglot social media circles: don’t drill words, drill structures. Disembodied parts of speech have little salience on their own. Your brain needs something to hang them onto.

Damage Limitation

Of course, when all your Anki cards are done, you’re already in a bit of a bind over this. You could go back and update all your cards to be sentences (sourcing them from a bank like Tatoeba, for example). But that’s a lot of work.

Instead, you can embed mixological words in some kind of context on the fly. When cross-contamination occurs, think of a phrase – however short – to include the word in. Use alliteration, rhyme, any trick to make it stick. Say it out loud, enjoy the sound of it, visualise it. And try to recall that same phrase whenever the troublesome word pops up again. For my Swahili pair, I came up with:

  • mji wa ajabu (a wonderful town)
  • dada mwenye adabu (a good-mannered sister)

In both cases I’ve chosen a word repeating the troublesome letter (d/j) to highlight the problem sound. I won’t say I never mix them up now – but it has certainly helped.

From my novice Hebrew, another example shows that you can sometimes even combine them together. Take tsar (tight, narrow) and tsad (side). Smoosh them up into tsad tsar (narrow side), and they might just end up sorting each other out.

What words do you tend to mix up in your target language? And how do you go about fixing it? Let us know in the comments!

An old, brick-style mobile phone. The notification problem was significantly less noticeable with these! Image from freeimages.com.

Creating a Notification-Free Language Routine

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We’re slaves to our mobile devices these days. At least that’s what a whole tranche of research suggests, popularised in books like How to Break Up With Your Phone, Digital Minimalism and Smart Phone, Dumb Phone. Mobile operating systems bake in an addiction-dependency loop, the notification system being the carrot to our donkey brains. We just can’t help coming back for more.

I took a short study break away recently, in order to get some well-needed head space. My mistake? I didn’t plan any notification downtime. And it was my language learning apps that rudely interrupted my calm most, calling me to constant action. Green owl, I’m particularly looking at you. It’s time for your lesson! You were knocked out of the top ten! There’s still time to move up in the Diamond league!

Now, I’m a good lad and I always do my daily Duo. But the nagging began to feel a bit… stressful.

Pavlov’s Notifications

There’s an element of shtick to all this, of course, that Duolingo has very successfully spun into social media gold. It’s genius, to be honest; a top-class case study in building a brand identity. That mock menace is all part of the fun in the learning. It’s often great to have bad cop on our backs, cajoling us into action when we’d rather just idle.

But it can all feel a bit Pavlov’s dogs at times.

As a bit of a control freak myself, I find that aspect particularly unsettling. How much control have I ceded to my phone’s notification system? To what extent am I still enacting my own free will here? And how well has that notification system trained me to keep running back for more endorphin hits, even sans notification? Checking the phone first thing in the morning, walking to various destinations (never a great idea), last thing at night…

If I were a dog, my trainer would be collecting an award right now.

Granted, we’re not talking about mindless entertainment or trivial content. Those language learning pings emanate from some of the best educational apps out there: Duolingo, Anki, Glossika. Surely that isn’t a waste of time?

Well, no. But as part of a wider problem of notification addiction, I thought it was time to wrest control back just a little. To start using these resources on my own terms again.

Off With His Notification!

So it’s off with the Duolingo notifications, for a start. As much as I love the competitive side of it – daily targets, leagues, monthly quests – I hate being told what to do (it’s that control freak in me again). I already love doing my daily lessons. I’m not going to forget, so you don’t have to stress me out by reminding me every five minutes that I’ve dropped out of the top ten.

Likewise, I’m always on the lookout for more non-digital opportunities to learn and practise foreign languages. I’m building up an old-school language library, and taking time to go through those wonderful, physical materials mindfully, and far from my phone. I build in plenty of one-to-one and group classes to get time with real human beings. I’m using my devices for more slow learning tasks like reading books and listening to podcasts, which complement the fast-and-furious educational app mode (variety is key!). And I’m trying to follow general advice around breaking phone addiction: having a no-scroll rule for morning and night, and giving myself a phone curfew.

It is possible to break notification addiction, while still benefitting from wonderful resources like Duolingo. You just have to cede to your own inner control freak now and again.

A big slice of cheese. And Anki moved mine! Picture from freeimages.com

Who Moved My Cheese? Anki media folder, Mac edition

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It is actually a fair while since I last tinkered under the Anki hood. I haven’t needed to, to be honest. I’d set everything up just right for my current clutch of active and maintenance languages way back, and everything was chugging along nicely.

But polyglot dreams never sleep for long. The need for a fresh round of customising came from an exciting new side project, Croatian. Easy, I thought. I’ll rustle up some cute Croatian card layouts, complete with a cute wee flag.

The problem: everything had changed!

Frustratingly, it was no longer possible to access the media and backup folders from the app itself. There must be some rationale behind this, of course, and it’s not hard to reason why. Wrong moves when messing with app files can be dangerous for your precious vocab database.

But, for low stakes operations like simply dropping an image into the media folder, it seems reasonable to have access to it (with a helpful dose of caution!). Unfortunately, there’s a dearth of how-to out there right now. It took a bit of Googling and re-Googling to find the answer. But, finally, I sorted it.

And here’s how!

Anki media folder (Mac)

The Anki library folder now lives in the following place on a Mac:

/Users/[your_username]/Library/Application Support/Anki2/[your_anki_name]

However, the path is probably hidden to you from the Library level up. To get round that, bring up your username folder (Users/[your_username]) in Finder. Then,  hold down command (⌘), shift and the full stop (period, .) key to show hidden files and folders. You should now see a whole load of extra items, including the Library folder. Drill down from there along the above path, and you should end up in your Anki directory.

If it’s not there, then it’s also worth trying the ‘all users’ version of that path:

/Library/Application Support/Anki2/[your_anki_name]

Once you’ve located it and entered the (now) secret lair, it’s still collection.media we’re interested in as before. You can drop whatever you like in here, and refer to it in your card templates and other custom Anki items – just like in the old days!

Once you’re done, of course, you might well want to hit command (⌘), shift and the full stop again go hide all those oddly-named bits and pieces – until the next time!