When I talk about word cards I mean cards that contain no information beyond the definition (usually in English) and the reading of the word being tested.

This card format is problematic for a number of reasons. If you do not have a context which disambiguates the usage of the word being tested you will almost inevitably get the wrong idea. There is only very few 1:1 relationships in vocabulary usage between Japanese and English. Trying to learn a word by remembering the English definition rather than getting a feeling for it through usage examples will lead to you not being able to recognize the word in a practical context (or only with great difficulty). It is ultimately wasted effort and the lack of having a context/experience to 'memory hook' the word to will cause you to have a much harder time remembering it, making Anki nothing but a painful chore. (Needless to say this is less of a problem for advanced learners)

Other reasons might be the removedness from any real Japanese of this card format, the sheer amount of wrong definitions in JMdict, usage cases or nuances not covered by definitions and there being no way of dealing with unclear or vague definitions. I leave it up to you to figure out what something like 面目躍如 might mean from the English definition. It is fine to have word cards for proper nouns and names for which you are only trying to recall the reading.

What is a sentence card?

This term seems to be used rather loosely to refer to a number of slightly different card formats with a sentence on the front and, depending on who is talking, varying information on the back.

This information can contain pitch accent information, furigana annotation, the word being tested and it's definition (which may or may not be highlighted on the front of the card), sentence audio and possibly a translation of the entire sentence. Needless to say there is some variation and I won't talk about every single one of them.

This card format is definitely a step-up from pure word cards but I think this it has some disadvantages which make them inferior to audio cards.

How do you make sentence cards?

There seem to be a few prevalent ways of going about creating sentence cards. One way seems to be to note down the sentences you encounter in your input, paste them into Anki, let the Japanese support plugin generate the readings (which I don't really think is smart in the first place) and copy a definition you like out of qolibri. See here and here. Biggest disadvantage to these cards is the complete lack of audio (see 1.3)

Another way of making cards, from Anime specifically, is to turn an entire Anime show into subs2srs cards and then either go through the show in Anki (see here and here ), annotate the entries and move them to a deck you want to review while deleting every card you don't need. It's quite hard for me to believe anyone does this just due to how inefficient and boring it is but this seems to be the prevalent way to use subs2srs. I may write more on the problem I have with subs2srs later. (TBA)

Both of these methods seem quite inefficient to me and result in subpar flashcards. In the first place one might wonder why, when one has the option to make use of automatic flashcard creation and dictionary tools such as nazeka and Yomichan, one would go through the trouble with less efficient methods. That said there do seem to be some people creating sentence cards efficiently so I will not talk about the time it takes to create flashcards in the rest of this section.

Do they work?

Definitely. These cards are better than traditional word cards and will help you make real Japanese gains. However I think they are less efficient in doing this than audio cards and I want to explain to you why I feel this way.

I'm just a dude with an opinion and I'd appreciate it if you stayed aware of that while reading the next passage. Ultimately you can use everything I show you for sentence cards as well.

• Point 1: You can review audio cards/context word cards much faster than sentence cards. The time you save you can invest into consuming more Japanese which is where you actually make gains. Alternatively you can get a much greater amount of cards done. Due to the way these cards are reviewed this will not impact the 'quality' of the information you retain. For how I review my audio cards please see 3.6. While I do not have hard review data from people who did both sentence cards and audio cards, the people I convinced to try audio cards, that did sentence cards before, have reported a much better experience reviewing. I'd still like to show you some people's stats here:

Point 2: Sentence cards are too easy and will not as efficiently increase your passive vocabulary as audio cards will. There is a problem with reviewing a card in a context you are already familiar with. Before you finish reading the sentence and getting to your target vocabulary you will already have recalled the situation and the meaning. This is an absolute guarantee if you put an image on the front of the card. It is obvious that this is not a good thing as you have not activated language information in order to access the relevant information, but merely your context memory of that particular situation. Needless to say you will never again encounter the exact same context in your input and therefore your reviewing process fails to simulate future reading scenarios. Audio cards do exactly that. They strip the context information from the front of the card forcing you to be capable of recalling the meaning and reading regardless of context. Instead they make use of the context to teach you the word. For more on this view see later sections.

• Point 3: Sentence cards test too much. Rather than testing yourself on one item using one card you will have to think about if you understood the entire context, your target item inside that context and all the readings inside your sentence. This is a lot to think about when you have to repeat this potentially hundreds of times and I understand why people from the MIA/AJATT community of Japanese learners talk about things like 'decision fatigue'. Audio cards are, in what they test you on, essentially word cards and you will not have any problem whatsoever making a decision in 2-3 seconds (3.6). Word recognition takes milliseconds and your brain is equipped with everything it needs to recognize independent of context provided you already have experience with that word.

• Point 5: 'By reviewing sentences you will build internal grammar and remember word usages useful in your output.' I have several problems with this idea. First of all when you are reviewing sentences you are not recalling sentences. The sentence is not the object you are trying to remember as it is on the front of the card so by what logic do you now remember the exact usage case when you try to use the word yourself? You could say this happens solely because you are reading the same sentence a handful of times but I don't think that's very plausible. I already mentioned how sentence card reviews are too easy so your mind has to do absolutely no work to know what the sentence means. Why would it bother trying to save information it does not need? The second problem I have with this statement is that in it is the idea that you are not using Anki to assist your input but that you are planning to learn the language through Anki. I really don't think you can learn a language through Anki. The answer for me is to get more input and see the structures I want to learn in a large number of different situations. Part of that is cutting down on inefficient reviews which eat up valuable time. Are you planning on making a sentence card for every usage case of every word? Because that is an absolutely herculean task that will take you forever (and is not necessary in the first place). And as it is not something anyone has ever done I think I can dismiss this idea. Now, 百歩譲って even if this were true you could do audio cards and simply listen to the back of the cards while reaping all the benefits of both cards, although that is not how I do my reviews see 3.6.

1.3 The Importance of Word and Sentence Audio

• Step 3: Go into into your styling options and paste the following sections into the front template, styling and back template fields: https://pastebin.com/vnmKgqDk

Add → Cards → Paste

Warning: If you are on Anki 2.1 and don't have your OS set to Japanese Anki will likely not default to a Japanese font if using 'arial' but a Chinese one. In that case you need to define a font that actually contains Japanese characters in the styling field such as 'MS UI Gothic'.

Of course you are free to make other changes to the styling as well. The cards should suit your preferences.

There are a lot of things you can do to make your review experience more comfortable. Even though not all of these may be strictly necessary or differ based on preference I very strongly advise you follow all these steps:

• Optional Step 1: Set the 'Maximum reviews/day' limit to 9999.

If you have too many reviews you should not limit the reviews Anki lets you do but decrease your new cards. This default limit of '100' severely interferes with the Anki algorithm so this is more of an obligatory step.

• Optional Step 2: Under the 'Lapses' tab change 'Leech action' to 'Tag only'

Anki will remove cards in your Anki deck if you fail them enough times for them to become a 'leech' if you do not do this. This is not necessary. If you are creating good cards the information will stick eventually. The key may very well be to just get more input but nothing is achieved by removing the cards.

• Optional Step 3: Under Tools → Preferences, in the 'Basic' tab change the 'Learn ahead limit' to 90 minutes.

This will differ on how big your review steps are. Make sure it exceeds all your steps.

• Optional Step 4: Change the steps under the 'New Cards' tab and the 'Lapses' tab. Mine are '1 5 60' for new cards and '2 60' for lapses.

Steps are the amount of minutes that pass between reviews. For example with my settings I would see a new card again in 1 minute if I failed it and in 5 minutes if I passed it. If I passed it again after 5 minutes I would see it in 60 minutes again before it graduates. This does not mean that I will have to wait 60 minutes to see that card, but that it will practically be at the end of my review load. At least with the 'review ahead' limit we set up in the previous step.

• Optional Step 5: Change the 'New interval' under the 'Lapses' tab.

Mine is set to 15% but you can change it to whatever you like. If the new interval is set to 0% every failed card will revert to an interval of 1 day. This is not necessary as the card is not equivalent to new information you haven't seen before. With a 15% interval a card that previously had an interval of 100 days would appear again in 15 days upon being failed. Save yourself from over-reviewing your cards.

• Optional Step 6: Install load balancer. Tools → Add-ons → Browse & install → Code: 1417170896

This add-on will prevent your reviews spiking on some days even if you have a varied amount of new cards.

I suggest you copy my settings. They will prevent load balancer from interfering with intervals as small as 3 days while still producing very good balancing results. The default settings seem to necessitate it to mess with all intervals making it interfere with the Anki algorithm more than it should.

Tools → Preferences → Load Balancer

• Optional Step 7: Let new cards show up before reviews. Tools → Preferences → 'Show new cards before reviews'

That way the steps come around during your actual review time.

• Optional Step 8: Sign up for Ankiweb

By signing up for Ankiweb you can have an online backup for your cards and therefore not having to fear disc corruption or anything like that. You can also sync between devices.

However, for the love of god: Don't do this if you are a subs2srs 'tard with one million cards.

• Step 2: Install the AnkiConnect Anki add-on. Tools → Add-ons → Browse & install → 2055492159 → OK → Restart Anki

This add-on lets Yomichan connect to Anki and create flashcards inside your deck.

• Step 6: Edit the Handlebars.js at the very bottom to remove all html inside your cards: <removed because yomichan update broke it, you can ask on djt or discord for one that works with the current version, what i do is the default one but without the glossary field just manually copying the definition i want>

By default Yomichan adds some html shit to your cards that forces indentation to the left, makes a big list of definitions and causes the editing of definitions to be a pure nightmare. At the point you are using multiple dictionaries you already don't want to include all definitions on your cards. What I suggest you do is use this handlebars.js which removes all html elements and makes editing your cards very easy. You want the definition field to be manually picked and as simple as possible so there is no need for lists and fancy formatting as it will be one line in the vast majority of cases.

Note: The window only appears if you activated advanced options.

2.3 ShareX Setup

ShareX is a free and open-source screenshot and screencast utility for Microsoft Windows (Wikipedia). It can really do a lot and I suggest you go and read about it yourself on their page. The things we need for our cards are screenshot capturing, audio recording and OCR. I will walk you through the setup in this section. ShareX is also capable of making videos and GIFs if you prefer that in your Anki cards or need it for other purposes.

Linux alternative:

• You can try following this guide written by an anon on the /jp/ DJT: https://pastebin.com/01PynWM9

• Step 1: Get ShareX.

You can choose between the self contained portable version and the installer.

• Step 2: Define a place for ShareX to save all your files.

Application settings → Paths → Browse (below the use custom screenshots folder check mark) → Select your folder

Should be somewhere quickly accessible.

• Step 3: Set up a hotkey for screenshots.

1. Hotkey settings → Add → Task: Screen capture → Capture region (transparent)

2. Click on 'none' → Define key combination for screenshots

I'm activating the screenshot function using a button on my epic gamer mouse which I recommend you do as well. If you don't have assignable buttons just put in whatever key combination you are comfortable with.

• Step 4: Fine tune screenshot hotkey settings:

  • Tick 'override after capture settings'

  • Untick 'upload to image host'

  • Go to image tab → Tick 'override image settings' → JPEG

ShareX has global settings but lets you overwrite those global settings for hotkey specific settings if you tell it to. By default ShareX will attempt to upload to an image host when you take your first screenshot which is what we disable here. We also want JPEG to save space on Ankiweb. Maybe you want to untick 'copy image to clipboard' in your global setting so we override capture settings as well. Pasting the image from your clipboard into Anki is a necessity for fast flashcard creation.

Success! You can now use your hotkey to take a screenshot which you can directly paste into Anki.

Image pasting from your clipboard also works on a lot of other sites like 4chan and Discord.

I suggest you also set up a second screenshot hotkey with the function 'capture active window'. I find this function more useful for grabbing visual novel screenshots.

• Step 6: Set up audio recording

1. Go to 'capture' and tick 'override capture settings'

2. Go to 'screen recording options' and click on 'download' to download ffmpeg

After ffmpeg downloaded a message telling you that ffmpeg was successfully installed should appear.

In this video you can see me creating one card using everything we have setup in the second section of this guide. I want to stress that I did not try to create this card at my usual speed but instead wanted make every step as clear as possible. I also edited and put the daijirin example into the sentence field which is not strictly necessary. With some practice making an identical card should not take more than 20-30 seconds.

As you can see Anki is on standby with the 'yomichan' tag selected. That way we can instantly get on working on the cards that we make. Once you have created a good amount of cards simply remove the tag for the list to clear up again.

Breaking it down:

1. Identify the word you want to add during watching and add it using Yomichan

2. Copy the definition of your liking and paste it into the definition field. (If you understand the definition in a J-J dictionary use that. Otherwise use an English one.)

3. Copy the context and paste it into the sentence field.

4. Use the sidebar to navigate to the subtitle you want to start capturing from and record the audio using ShareX . Paste the audio in Anki.

5. Take a screenshot using ShareX and paste it into Anki.

Success! Now you can create audio cards from every Japanese subtitled show out there.

For the sidebar to optimally work for the purpose of audio recording you may want to slightly offset the subtitles.

If you want to know how to batch re-time subtitles to a video or to a reference subtitle see 4.3.

You can use Subtitle Edit to batch offset subtitles by a static time (Maybe TBA).

Animelon and Daiweeb are decent alternatives if you don't care to download and re-time subtitles yourselves. Card making is a bit clunkier though and you can't build yourself a searchable subtitle database of things you have watched. (TBA)

• Step 1: Setting up Textractor

After you have downloaded Textractor it will ask you to what language Bing should translate to. Machine translation is an unreliable mess and should never be used for anything. By default it comes with some crap that we don't need so we'll start by removing that.

• Step 2: Hooking your visual novel

  • Launch your visual novel and start the game so some text is displayed on screen

  • Launch Textractor → 'Attach to game' → Find and select the process for your game → OK

  • Go back to your visual novel and advance by one line

  • Go back to Textractor and scroll through all threads until you find one that matches the text

Now the visual novels text will be copied to our clipboard whenever we advance the text. → You can directly paste it into Anki!

• Step 3: Install a clipboad inserter

For Chrome and for Firefox.

You turn it on by clicking on the icon inside the browser task bar.

If you are using Chrome you may need to allow it to access local files. Otherwise it is incapable of accessing the html page we download in the next step.

• chrome://extensions/ → Details → Allow access to file URLs

• Step 4: Download the page as html and run it in your browser

You actually have several options for what html page you want to use. They differ in design and functionality. I recommend you use this (https://pastebin.com/raw/zDY6s3NK) as it includes a line and character counter and lets you delete unwanted lines. For alternatives see the DJT guide on text hooking.

• Right click on the page → Save as... → Replace .txt with .html → Open the page in your browser and favorite it for quick access

• Step 5: Combining everything

  • Launch your visual novel → Hook the text → Launch your html page → Activate the clipboard inserter

Now the game text will appear inside your browser. You use Yomichan to look up any unknown words and use it create flashcards if needed. We are now ready to create audio cards.

Breaking it down:

1. Identify the word you want to find and create a card using Yomichan

2. Paste the text inside your clipboard into Anki

3. Copy and paste the definition of your liking into the definition field

4. Record the audio and paste it into the audio field

5. Take a screenshot and paste it into the picture field

For taking visual novel screenshots I prefer the 'capture active window' function that you see me using here. Also, how you replay audio differs by visual novel. For some you do it with a hotkey, sometimes you need to go into the text log and click on the line and sometimes it's not even possible. In that case you can try the method I suggest for video games. For the visual novel in the video you do it with a mouse gesture.

Success!

We can now create audio cards from visual novels!

If you are wondering where you can download visual novels ask on DJT!

Hard subtitled video: This is something quite a few Japanese Youtubers seem to do. You can try OCR to get the sentences but it often doesn't work or produces very bad results. I like to simply screenshot the sentences and insert them into Anki.

You can still use automatically generated subtitles for clickable time stamps .

Lastly, I also like to use the 'hint' field for words without any kanji. As kanji provide a lot of semantic insight you can generally accurately recall the meaning without seeing the context. This is much more challenging for words without kanji. It's not necessary but I do often add the context to the hint field in such cases especially for onomatopoeia and the like.

Sync to text

Requires a bit more setting up but ultimately provides the best result from the experiences that I made.

• Step 1: Extract the English reference subtitle out of your video file.

For this I recommend using Inviska MKV Extract.

(There is a lot of programs that can extract from MKV files, just search for MKV extract.)

• (Skip this unless you have problems) Step 1.1: Clean the the subtitle if it as an .ass file

Doing this is probably only necessary if the .ass subtitle contains karaoke but signs may interfere with syncing as well.

I recommend you use Inviska ASS Stripper for this.

• Step 2: Make sure your .ass and .srt file are in the same folder with the other files like in the step above. Also have them named the same with Ant renamer.

Note that I am saying .ass because most English subtitles are in the .ass format especially if you grab a BD release. If your reference subtitle isn't in the .ass format just batch convert using Subtitle Edit. You can also rewrite the .bat files but that's more effort.