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How to expand decks by making cards with Anki



The purpose of Xefjord's Complete Language Series is two fold: to both create free and basic resources to help learners get started with any language they may want to learn, and also to give learners and translators the resources necessary to use, create, and expand their Anki courses in an effective and useful way. The basic templates provided by Anki are pretty bad at meeting the requirements of most modern language teaching standards. I created an Advanced Card template believing that every good language learning resource should have example sentences, audio, typing exercises, and even visual aids if possible. You may find some templates that are even fancier or more colorful, but the purpose of Xefjord's Complete Languages is to get out a template that has everything you need, in a way that is easy to understand and expand off of even if you don't know HTML coding. So how do we make good Anki cards?


Within every Anki course provided by Xefjord's Complete Languages, there will be at least one card under the sub deck titled Core XYZ Vocabulary. It will probably say 2 since every card is counted twice for Front and Back versions of the card. The cards found within Core XYZ Vocabulary will be what I call "Advanced Cards." This is because the template is far more encompassing than what is used in the Basic Words and Phrases subdeck. To create new cards you go to the Add button at the top row of Anki.

The first thing you will want to do is make sure you are making cards using the correct template and putting them into the correct deck. At the top of the new "Add" window you will see two drop down boxes, with one being labeled Type and the other being labeled Deck. The Type box should say "XYZ Vocab" (This is the name of my advanced card template) and the Deck box should say "Xefjords Complete XYZ::Core XYZ Vocabulary" as that is the name of our Advanced deck. If either are wrong you can click them and change them from a dropdown list of your currently available templates/decks. Do not use XYZ Basic to create your cards, the template doesn't meet the requirements for good language learning into the intermediate level, and is only used as a crutch to teach necessary survival phrases to beginners.

Now we will go down the list in the order you will likely be filling it in, starting first with "Word." The thing about the Core XYZ Vocabulary deck is that unlike the Basic Words and Phrases deck there is no wordlist or direction that it suggests you go. If you are a learner beyond the basic level you can start adding in words that interest you on whatever topic you want to know more about, or add in words you learned from whatever book or article you started reading that day. But for the sake of this article I am going to assume the creator of the deck is either a learner who just finished the Basic Words and Phrases, or a teacher looking to expand the deck further for educational use. So for a new learner or teacher, you will likely want to either follow the order of a textbook/course or a wordlist when creating new cards to assure that you reach the widest variety of important words and vocabulary. For example, when learning with a modern Japanese textbook like Genki 1, there is word lists at the beginning of every chapter: so you can just work on making each of those words into their own card, and follow the order of the book/course. If you do not have a textbook/course, or the language is so unsupported that you are working on building one of the first courses from scratch, then I highly recommend you use this word list to get started. It is made by the awesome founder of Fluent-Forever, Gabriel Wyner. While I don't agree with all of his Anki design suggestions, the actual vocabulary list is incredibly solid. So to start, lets just use the word Cat (and continue with our visual example of using Dutch). You should add in the word in your target language to the "Word" box, and the English translation of the word IN BOLD to the "Word Translation" box. The bold makes the card look prettier and will be important to bringing attention to the important parts of the card later. If there is any additional information you want to add to the word, like maybe the word is feminine, masculine, in a conjugated form, etc. I would add those to the "Word Translation" section in brackets like (This). If it can have multiple English nuances you type the "Word Translation" like "Cat / Kitten." But try not to include unrelated homonyms under one "Word Translation" as you can make those into separate cards with different example sentences so learners can understand its context better. Since the example sentence is the top level card you can have repeat words in your target language, but try not to repeat "Word Translation" words for clarity.

Next we will work on the "Sentence" section. Here you will want to use the word you picked out in an example sentence to help give context to yourself or the learners as to how the word is used. Some courses will have example sentences already provided, or if you are a native speaker creating a course you may be able to come up with creative and culturally specific sentences yourself. If you are working without a course or need inspiration for sentences however there is an amazing website you can reference called Tatoeba. This website will let you type in a word then see it used in various sentences (often with their English translation as well) across a wide variety of languages. This is an amazing resource and can be used to fill out example sentences for most languages. Some dictionaries also include example sentences for their languages and you can reference those as well if you know of good ones. The "Sentence" box will be filled with a sentence entirely in your target language, and with the word being taught bolded. For this example lets take this sentence from Tatoeba: "De kat miauwde." In the "Sentence Cloze" box you will copy and paste this same sentence, but replace the word being taught with a bolded underscore like "De _ miauwde." On the Anki editor you might not be able to easily tell that the underscore is bolded, but on the actual card everything bold becomes purple so it will be easier to see. There will be an underline under a letter B at the top right that confirms it is in fact bolded when you highlight the underscore with your mouse. In the "Sentence Translation" box you will include the English translation in the same format as the original sentence: with the target word in bold. Ex. "The cat meowed." For agglutinative languages it is up to the translators discretion whether they want to bold a whole word with all its conjugations or just the stem of the word when doing bolding with sentences.


And as a final tip, if any of the words seem to have a weird coloring, weird backgrounds, or other font issues, you can click the Ex at the top right while highlighting the text to remove all text formatting. Sentences you copy and paste into these boxes that already have bolding may have to be re-bolded as sometimes the HTML doesn't properly recognize them (They will still appear bold on the cards, but won't be colored purple like they should be). I just re-bold everything that was already pasted in bold just to be safe.

After setting up the words and setting up the sentences, there is only 3 sections left, and that is the "Part-Of-Speech", "Audio", and "Image" section. None of my advanced cards include images to avoid copyright issues and if you desire to republish a deck you should probably avoid adding in images as well, but images can be taken from websites like Unsplash that are free to use, or if you are a part of an organization you can release your own locally created images if you really want to spice up a deck further. For learners who have no interest in re-uploading their decks, you are free to take images from google or other places as visual aids to supplement your own personal study (and I recommend you to if you have the time and energy!)


Audio is something that a native teacher can record and provide themselves using a free program like Audacity, Goldwave, or even their own phones native recording software. MP3 files can be directly dragged and placed into the Audio section and then the audio will play every time the card is flipped. If you are not a teacher providing your own recordings, you can go to the website Forvo and make an account. Forvo is a free database of audio recordings in every language that you can download and use for your own personal educational use. Many recordings from the Basic Words and Phrases section of a bunch of languages come from Forvo. Admittedly its usefulness starts to dip off as you work with more obscure languages, but you can always request translations there and the website is constantly getting better. "Part-Of-Speech" is probably one of the more easy sections to fill out, as it is just declaring a word to be a Noun, Verb, Adjective, Pronoun, Adverb, Phrase, etc. It is just helpful information to know for any student or language learner while learning the language and building cards.

The picture above is the likely end result of a finished card, and you can now click "Add" at the bottom to make it a part of your deck. At any point you can go back and edit a card you made in the same session by hitting the "History" button next to the "Add" button at the bottom, and you can also use that History button to preview recently made cards. What if I made a mistake or want to check cards from a previous session?

There is a couple different mistakes you could make while working with cards, and I will try to work you through all the most common ones. 1. You want to view or change a card from a previous session but it is no longer in your history. If this happens you will need to go back to Anki's home screen and select the "Browse" button to the right of the "Add" button. A new window will pop up, and within this window you can either use the search bar at the top to find the all the cards using the word you are looking for, or you can search the entire deck manually by clicking on it's name in the list on the left half of the window.


After using either of these functions it will bring up a list of cards in the middle right pane, and you can click on any of these cards and change their sections at the bottom of the window. After clicking on a card you can also click on the "Preview" button at the top right of the window and see how the card will actually look while it is being studied. Here is an example preview of the card we just made:

2. You want to change the order the cards appear in or wipe the study progress you made while testing/using a deck. For the most part the cards will appear and be due in the same order you created them in, but sometimes you want to change that order, or you started studying with a deck and now the order seems messy and can't be re-uploaded. Just like with the first problem, you will start by going to the Anki home screen and clicking the "Browse" button. From there you will click on the deck you are trying to edit in the left pane (same left arrow in problem 1). After that you will likely want to right click on the top row showing "Card, Due, and Deck" and then it will bring up a drop down box with many check marks. Click the "Created" to add a check mark to it as this will allow you to sort cards by the order they were created. The solutions after will depend slightly on what it is you are trying to do:


You want to reset a deck you already started? Assuming the whole course was created in the order it was intended to be taught: Click the "Created" column header to sort by date created. Check the dates to make sure they are in the order you want, then you can click any card and press CTRL+A. This will select all the cards. After all the cards are selected you can go to the top left and click "Cards" then you can click "Reschedule" this will make all the cards due as new cards again. The order will likely still have problems however, and you may need to sort by "Created" again and then CTRL+A select everything, then click on "Cards" at the top left and click "Reposition." If you accept the default settings it will reposition all the cards due dates in the order you have selected them (in the order they were created) starting at 0 and counting up. This should completely reset your course for re-upload.


You want to change the order of individual cards within the deck?

Maybe the course is not in the order it was originally intended, assuming you have already rescheduled all of the cards so they are all due and in the order they were created, what do you do if you need to move a newly created card to the middle of the course? Well you start by looking at the list and finding where in the course you want to put the card in order of "Due." Lets say you have 500 cards and you want to put a card in 250th place. You will often scroll to and scout out the cards around where you you want to move your newly created card (Which your new card will be at the back of the list in place 500). You will look at the cards New #249 (Lets say it is Turtle) and the cards New #250 (Lets say it is Mouse). There will probably be two cards with the same number for each (This represents the front and back of the same card). You will then go back to your new card and highlight select both the front and back of the card (both the cards labeled New #500). You will then go up to the top left and click "Cards" then "Reposition" and it will bring open a new window, where you will put 250 as the start position. Make sure the box saying "Shift position of existing cards" is checked. It should then move our card to be after Turtle, and every card after (Mouse, etc) will be moved up one position to be after our new card. You can move more than one card by selecting say... 5 cards (it would be 10 rows front and back), then if you repeat the exact same process it would put all 5 of those cards after Turtle and then move Mouse and the cards after up 5 positions to be after your new cards.

3. You accidentally created a card in the wrong deck and want to change it? In this case you will want to go back to your home screen and click the "Browse" button (Much like how you start Problem 1 and 2) and then click the deck your misplaced card is located in on the left pane or search for the card on the top search bar (Like as shown in the first picture of Problem 1). After you find the card or cards, you will select all of them then go to the top left and click on "Cards" and then click "Change Deck" and it will let you choose where to migrate the cards to. If you need to change the position of these cards within this new deck, check the answer to Problem 2. Getting further help

Those three answers should solve 99% of problems people often encounter when working with Anki, if there is any more questions you are free to email me at xefjordscompletelangs@gmail.com or to ask for help on the discord server linked on the homepage. There is also whole communities and various guides online all over instructing people on the basics of Anki. Anki is an amazing tool and with a little bit of guidance can be utilized by anyone to create high quality language learning study and review material. Hopefully this helps!

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