Already caveating with the "core" code. Even without PE and VC, it's clear that a company with 35 employees is bound to take this in a different direction than 1 guy, and not a good one. If there comes a day where those 35 employees can't be sustained anymore by revenue, and the choice is between enshittification and shutting down/firing everyone, we'll see what happens. That's the big difference - such a decision was never on the cards, or at least much less likely, when run by a single person. Now it will be.
Big conflict of interests too. AnkiHub makes money from selling paid addons. No chance any of those will ever end up in Anki now.
Also not a good look that they immediately locked the thread in their most popular community.
Anki is in a very solid position to be forked if anything happens, so even if this is bad news I have faith in the larger community.
https://orangeorapple.com/flashcards/
Easy to import and export my cards, plenty of options for tweaking the algorithms for my use.
With that out of the way, some thoughts:
- Anki is in a really good position to work around enshitification. The app, at least to me, is "complete" - the only additional features that might pique my curiosity is a different scheduler (at the moment, they're integrating a newer one, although I don't follow enough to know the state of it). Additionally, modern Anki is really well architected: the core of it is a Rust library, that is used by all of the platforms [0]. You can write new front ends using that, or just fork the existing FOSS ones. Maybe dae does a gorhill and gives us Anki Origin.
- Really the only service-y part of Anki I use is AnkiWeb, which is basically a backup and sync system. Wonder how that'll evolve (if they do end up charging for it, I hope it is "Obsidian" reasonable). EDIT: Ooo, Anki has public server software for running your own version. Awesome! [1]
- The idea outcome in my opinion would have been some form of charitable organisation (Linux Foundation?), with people donating to support Anki.
- So, AnkiHub is a company that produces Anki flashcards, and they've scaled that quickly? Jeez. Obviously Quizlet proved there was a market for flashcards, but I didn't realise this was possible for Anki.
- No outside investment is... hopeful. Not quite sure what indicates that this company has the technical know-how to maintain it.
- I've heard too many stories of a maintainer or creative being "hopeful" about their new acquirers, only to regret it years down the line.
(AnkiDroid has always been run independently, which is good, considering the state of the iOS client, which has always been neglected.)
> Governance and decision-making: How decisions are made, who has final say, and how the community is heard
> Roadmap and priorities: What gets built when and how to balance competing needs
> The transition itself: How to bring in more support without disrupting what already works
In other words: they have no clue what to do next (https://forums.ankiweb.net/t/ankis-growing-up/68610/2#p-1905...)
- Anki, as set up by dae aka Damien, is like the brand name and desktop implementation with the spaced repetition algorithm
- AnkiWeb is what I thought this hub thing was. It's where you download decks
- AnkiHub is a third party (started by "AnKing", now 35 employees) who sells decks as a monthly subscription and has their content on the deep web (you need to create an account and agree to terms to even see a listing of what's there besides a few featured parts). This is who is getting ownership of the former two. Because they write that Anki will remain open source at its "core", I presume that means that things will, at best, stay stable rather than anything (like AnkiWeb the deck sharing platform) becoming open
- AnkiDroid is a separate open source project (an Android app). The corporation is hiring the main developer, but it's not yet clear to me whether they're just going to get paid to work more on AnkiDroid or if they're also getting other tasks
> I ended up suggesting to them that we look into gradually transitioning business operations and open source stewardship over, with provisions in place to ensure that Anki remains open source and true to the principles I’ve run it by all these years.
> This is a step back for me rather than a goodbye - I will still be involved with the project, albeit at a more sustainable level.
From AnkiHub:
> No enshittification. We’ve seen what happens when VC-backed companies acquire beloved tools. That’s not what this is. There are no investors involved, and we’re not here to extract value from something the community built together. Building in the right safeguards and processes to handle pressure without stifling necessary improvements is something we’re actively considering.
Relieved at that part where they say there are no investors involved, makes the whole thing a whole lot less risky. Good for everyone involved, and here's to many more years with Anki :)
It would be interesting to have machine learning predict these probability evolutions instead. Simply recollecting tangential knowledge improves the recollection of a non-sampled factoid, which is hard to model in a strict sense, or perhaps easy for (undiscovered) dedicated analytic models. Having good performing but relatively opaque (high parameter counts) ML models could be helpful because we can treat the high parameter count ML model as surrogate humans for memory recollection experiments and try to find low parameter count models (analytic or ML) that adequately distill the learning patterns, without having to do costly human-hour experiments on actual human brains.
AnkiHub was already annoying with shoving AI into their Add-On without anyone asking for it.
I don't think this will go well
Honestly, for a program like Anki, starting out by saying "we need to figure out what good governance looks like, as well as what might be agreeable and possible for everyone involved" is a much stronger positioning than coming up with something that may or may not fly to try make a strong first impression. Communities do not follow the conventional rules of American business.
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To copy from my message on Discord:
> I’m moving to a full-time position working on Anki [incl. AnkiWeb & AnkiMobile]. I’m really excited about this, but there’s a mountain of pending, somewhat undefined work which will need to be done, and it’ll need my full-time attention for a while.
> I’ll still be contributing to AnkiDroid, but I won’t be able to commit as much time as I am doing currently (at least for the first few months while things stabilize). I’ll be here on evenings/weekends, and will be contributing in other ways (hopefully: unified Note Editor, JS addons etc… ), but I expect to slow down with code contributions to ensure I’m staying on on top of PR reviews & general force multiplier work. I’m definitely Org Admin’ing for GSoC over the summer [assuming Google gives us the greenlight], it’s historically been a VERY light role.
> In all honesty: I’m expecting things to be business as usual, I have more than enough capacity to keep up with the notification queue. Even if I completely dropped off the planet, we’re a great team and the improvements would keep on flowing. AnkiDroid’s bus factor has been >>> 1 for a LONG time now.
https://discord.gg/qjzcRTx => https://discord.com/channels/368267295601983490/701922522836...
But finding out there are no VCs, no investors, I’ll stay with Anki for now.
But still, these HN comments - after an announcement like this - are usually a good place to find out about replacements.
It might not be the worst idea to do that anyway. Anki is great, but there's plenty of room for improvement. Off the top of my head, an architecture that doesn't involve fragile and finicky python bits and is designed to support multiple independent clients would be a nice step up (Telegram is a good model here — make a core lib with all the nuts and bolts which devs build clients around).
Impressively, Mochi now offers FSRS (beta but still available in the app's main settings) and both the type of scheduler (Mochi default or FSRS) and the schedulers' settings are configurable on a deck-by-deck basis.
The developer is very responsive to folks on the forum and often quickly adds requested features.
Overall the app is well-designed and fun to use. I appreciate the swipe left/right to fail/pass cards on iOS. My one complaint is that the web clipper only works with Chrome and Firefox, but not with Safari (surprisingly). It would also be useful to have a global hotkey/palette to quick-add cards to various decks, similar to how OmniFocus lets you quickly add items to the OF Inbox.
Technically this can be implemented in Anki as an addon. But only the desktop version supports addons and the default UI is a bit too complicated.
> We’re currently talking to David Allison, a long-time core contributor to AnkiDroid, about working together on exactly these questions. His experience with AnkiDroid’s collaborative development is invaluable, and we’re grateful he’s willing to help us get this right. We’re incredibly excited to have him join us full-time to help propel Anki into the future.
and the classic method was the inspiration for Anki to begin with: making your own flashcards on index cards! You could do a version of spaced repetition by shuffling the deck.
Not sure the digital version is actually easier or more effective
Done right, commercial interests can often have a very positive symbiotic relationship with open source. Almost all the largest and best open source projects out there have substantial involvement from commercial interests.
I do think though that from a structural/governance perspective it's not a good idea for Anki to be owned by AnkiHub. Anki is a community project, not a corporate product, and while it sounds like the license will continue to reflect that, I personally think it would be best if the corporate structure did too. If Anki were spun out as an independent foundation (like Blender, Linux, etc) receiving most of its support and development work from AnkiHub, rather than owned outright, I think that would allow a much more robust governance structure than just having everything be under AnkiHub's direct control with some pinky promises about listening to the community.
I use it extensively in my teaching. The problem is deploying Anki on locked down networks can be difficult so I've built alternatives and hacks to let you deploy decks and school accounts, but making a full-featured web client would change all of this.
So maybe it's a good time for me to have also started one of my own that I'm temporarily calling libreSRS because I'm not sure of the new direction here.
The goal is to have a multi-user, multi-algorithm-capable, web-based system that exposes everything (especially uploading!!) to the web client.
FSRS just works, even without a GPU so it's not the cool kind of AI / machine learning these days.
No joke though: the FSRS model is marvelous, and Anki remains one of the best free + open source implementations around.
I've been learning German recently and Anki (in FSRS mode) is one of the most important learning tools I have. No joke.
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Every card remembers every rating you give it, as well as the time / date. This allows for Anki to solve for a 'forgetting curve', and predict when different cards have a chance to be forgotten.
There is furthermore the machine learning / stochastic descent algorithm to better fit the assumed forgetting curves to your historical performance. This is the FSRS Optimize parameters button in the settings panel.
https://github.com/open-spaced-repetition/fsrs4anki/wiki/The...
That is modern Anki. The core is a Rust library, which all the clients (desktop, web, Android and iOS) use. [0]
and then now why, of all times, when a solo developer is never more productive, would the lead maintainer cede ownership? the antidote for programming burnout has just been invented, just take it haha
Worth noting you don't need to use it. Anki comes with a syncserver implementation for a while now, and there are docker images too. It's worth it for the transfer speeds alone IMO.
Anki is under AGPL too, which has an anti-DRM clause, so many type of enshittification of anki or their addons (e.g. to prevent sharing of their decks) would be unenforceable too.
As such I see no obvious things that would be susceptible to enshittification here.
The ecosystem is currently such that it seems hard to enshittify it. They say they have no intention of doing that and I believe it, but their vision of a healthy and good product might involve a fair price (for rich countries at least) whereas it was always free so far
Time will tell; it sounds like there's currently no plans either way, but it's also simply open enough that users can always just install the open source software and share decks with each other by whatever file transfer/sharing means. Everything that's already there won't simply go away. I'm going to keep using AnkiDroid and building the language deck I am working on
It seems like the core things that Anki needs are new user experience improvements, and algorithm updates. SM2 really shows its age as compared to other algorithms.
Having ability to bake some of that into the tool in a configurable way would be ideal, and I hope thats sort of path they go down.
I realise in meantime plugins are an option, but I've found the quality of plugins very mixed.
>Absolutely. Anki’s core code will remain open source, guided by the same principles that have guided the project from the beginning.
>Anki’s core code will remain open source
Hmmmmmm. Could be benign, but... hmmmmmm...
Writing code is fun. Solving interesting problems is fun.
Debugging deep problems is fun.
Debugging slop code is a painful suffering experience, having to constantly double check that the AI agent didn't just change the unit tests to "return true" and lie to you is tiring, and the feeling that you can't significantly improve the tool burns me out hard.
That last one can't be overstated. When I find a weird behavior that looks like a bug in the linux kernel or rustc or such, I find it exhilarating to read code and understand what the bug is, how it got there, and to feel like I can fix it and never see it again.
When claude code gives me a "wrong" output for my prompt, I don't feel like there's any possible way I can go and find what part of the Opus 4.5 model resulted in it not being able to give better output.
I feel helpless to debug what went wrong when claude code spirals into the deep end.
I can add more initial context, add skills, but those are tiny heuristic tweaks around the giant mass of incomprehensible weights and biases that no human understands.
The antidote for programming burnout is not to replace all the fun parts of programming with painful probabilistic suffering.
AnkiHub's modus operandi has been to take over communities or projects where free exchange happens and monetize/paywall them. If you've been a part of the /r/medicalschoolanki subreddit, you know exactly what I mean. It's been hollowed out completely.
In the post, AnkiHub mentions how Anki is "sacred" to them. Yet, they have had no qualms entrenching themselves into Anki's settings menu as the only third-party ever to do so. [1] I am sure more is to come. And the language used in their post almost never helps their case, especially in the pricing and OSS sections.
I understand why Damien felt he was being a bottleneck in Anki's development. This is similar to what was happening with Bram and Vim. Ultimately, the community forked and built Neovim. Gorhill had also similarly transferred uBlock, but then came back and built uBlock Origin. So the precedents are there for a successful community-run or leader-run spinoff.
Syncing is sure to become a paid feature, and access to shared decks too.
Creating a fork pointed to a hosted version of Sync Server [2], and an alternative hub where people can share decks other than AnkiWeb [3] is paramount. As well as saving and preserving all of the decks there, as they are sure to go behind a paywall.
I, and I am sure many other HNers, would be willing to support that with our time and financially.
[0] https://www.ankihub.net/about-us [1] https://github.com/ankitects/anki/pull/3232 [2] https://docs.ankiweb.net/sync-server.html [3] https://ankiweb.net/shared/decks
"Our agreement with Damien stipulates that the current AGPLv3 code remains open source"
It sounds like a very specific dementi.
Obviously, like all ignorant people do, I am going to oversimplify things here. But still, to me, the "platonic idea" of Anki seems a dead simple thing. All what I care about when using Anki is what's on the 2 sides of a Card, a question + answer, which can only be some visual image (possibly encoded as text, possibly just JPEG, I really don't care as long as it fits in my mobile device memory) + optional sound. That's really it. If it should be bi-directional or uni-directional card is a detail of how the deck is generated/encoded, and the spaced repetition algorithm is a detail of the app that I use to study (so, usually AnkiDroid, I imagine — an unaffiliated 3rd party; who even uses desktop apps nowadays?).
So, I imagine there can exist (and do exist) some minor additional features, like an ability to require a typed answer for a card, but it seems pretty minor, and I really don't see a lot of room for the app to evolve.
So, ultimately people need only a common .apkg format, which exists and is relatively simple (although I suppose it could've been even simplier), and a place like AnkiWeb, where people can share their decks, so Spanish top-2000 or basic integrals deck isn't re-invented over and over again. It's a pity that AnkiWeb isn't more open and will be even less open from now on, but as long as someone is willing to just host it (which is ultimately just paying for downloads traffic) it's easy to replicate, so no super-valuable IP here.
Of course, a primary use-case for Anki is a tool to make decks, but you could really do with pretty simple python script + YAML/JSON/CSV/whatever metadata file to convert it to AnkiDroid-compatible .apkg file.
So, basically, who cares? What is to "own" there?
Commercial decks, where the deck maintainer is paid for his efforts, make a lot of sense.
And I suppose if they are making money out of the ecosystem, it also only makes sense that commercial deck makers make a contribution to the technology that makes it possible. I suppose I would prefer that be a contribution rather than ownership and custody, but I suppose Anki's license terms (it is AGPL3+ - I think without a CLA) prevents them closing it.
So cautiously optimistic
When I search for HSK vocabulary Anki decks or whatever they call it, I found almost exclusively sets of words that are the wrong way around. They showed me the Chinese characters and asked me what the English translation is. I was incredulous about how many wrong decks there are and that I could not find good decks. I was starting to wonder, if people are actually just using Anki to learn to read Chinese characters, one-way learning basically, only recognition not writing. Only for reading subtitles and such, instead of writing with friends. Or perhaps they have the illusion, that they are able to write, because they can type in the Pinyin, and will get a selection of characters, which they then can recognize. But I, I want to be able to properly write the characters myself. The crucial issue was, that I did not find a simple setting to invert the direction of translation of a deck. How can such a simple thing not be among the most easy to find actions to perform with a deck? I read something about it not being possible on mobile phone, but somehow being possible on computer, but not as simple as flipping a switch.
Ultimately, I abandoned Anki and recently proceeded made my own tool for learning the characters, that is highly configurable and that can change the direction with the change of one config attribute.
I also can’t imagine making cards on a phone, given how much switching between apps/windows is involved and how poor mobile platforms are at multitasking. It’s difficult to envision it being anything but maddening.
Even so, I believe there's room for another open competitor or two in this space.
> with provisions in place to ensure that Anki remains open source and true to the principles I’ve run it by all these years.
I really hope this holds.
If that is the case, it could be corrected in the deck options. And if the English->Chinese cards are missing altogether they can be created from the note by adding a new card template to the note.
And I recently wrote about making my own Anki Japanese cards in my blog[1]
[1] https://alt-romes.github.io/posts/2026-01-30-from-side-proje...
Anki is a platform, not a content creator. I would be thankful that someome shared their hard work of creating a deck that has all of the content to meet your needs.
For what it's worth, there are many "RTK" decks for Japanese that show english keyword on front and expect you to write the kanji before flipping.
Maybe search for an "RTH" deck to go along with the book Remembering the Hanzi.
Anki is an extremely powerful and feature rich software, and it seems that you barely scratched the surface before dismissing it.
Edit: it took me 10 seconds to find this deck https://ankiweb.net/shared/info/1489829777 there's probably a Simplified one as well. Good luck with your studies.
You can edit the structure of the card templates so they're the 'right way around' for you:
You built an entire flashcard app by yourself, but you couldn't figure out how to edit card templates in anki?
Ah who am I kidding, your probably just trying to advertise your app.
In the past 12 months, I've made £65.79 from GitHub Sponsors (no fees, thank you GitHub/Microsoft) and $87.89 from Patreon (pre-fees, I'll probably see ~$50), and a split of the Open Collective [below]
AnkiDroid GitHub Sponsors: https://github.com/sponsors/ankidroid
and finances/sponsorship: https://opencollective.com/ankidroid (with immense help from dae).
I see lots of people also moving stuff with AI that will clearly be biased and force products down your throat. This might be the end of the internet as we know, but the next thing, although sometimes looks exciting, will be controlled by faceless greedy monsters.
I guess the fact that we all didn't prioritise those small businesses is getting somewhere
So an app-store of sorts.
As others have said, there are some provisions in place that make it allegedly harder to do a hard landgrab and keep people from freely sharing decks, to to me, even if it were so, I would not be too concerned.
In my opinion, the very act of creating one's deck is a key part of the learning. Maybe it's different for larning vocabulary, but as you said, it will be very hard to make those hard to share.
Learning a deck generated by someone else has never been as effective with me, so I think it's a false sense of time saving to use those.
This is damn near the least effective way to use Anki. Cloze deletion alone surpasses this.
Also, Anki is SRS. The value of Anki is in the rescheduling, not in the fact it's flashcards. And Anki has implemented the FSRS rescheduling algorithm, which is just one more feature not all flashcard apps do.
A really disappointing development all around & I hope it galvanizes the community to fully disassociate itself from AnkiHub & dae.
The deck you linked is not mentioning HSK in the description though. It was maybe 1 year ago or so, that I searched for HSK1-3 level decks and only got wrong direction ones.
I am searching again now:
(1) "HSK1 English" -- nothing
(2) "HSK1" -- lots of results, but also tons of results that are not relevant for me, because they are not for English. -- Results like https://ankiweb.net/shared/info/1474834583 -- but that is 1-4 which is too much for me. I either need the 1, 2, 3 levels separate, or 1-3 in one deck. Also finding https://ankiweb.net/shared/info/166845167, which is the wrong way around. Starts right away by asking me "的" instead of something like "(some description here)". When I go to deck options in Anki desktop app, I see "Display Order", but there I cannot select any "English -> Chinese". Tons of options, but none that inverts what the cards show.
One sibling comment informs me, that I have to edit a template somewhere. But I don't know where, and in the deck options I don't quickly see any template editing function.
And this has been my experience with pretty much every HSK deck I found there. It would seem silly, that everyone uploads decks in the "wrong" order. Which leads me to think, that many people cheat themselves, by only doing the recognition part of learning the characters. Why else would so many people upload decks, only so that whoever who downloads the deck has to invert them first, before using them. I also think that many learners are probably not aware of the issue with seeing the character first and then translating to English, in comparison with doing it the other way around.
So now lets do your "RTH" search:
"HSK1 RTH" -- " Error: Please log in to perform more searches."
I am sorry, I cannot even do a keyword search a couple of times??? I need to log in, requiring an account (!) to even find a suitable deck?! OK, at this point I give up again.
I have not much to gain from advertising my app. It is AGPL and I don't plan on ever selling it. If it is useful to other people, that's great. If not, then it will at least be very useful to myself. I don't see what's wrong with mentioning, that I build my own, especially since this is HN. We are not on TikTok here.
A significant number of anki users (eg: medicine, law - others) are working with pre-made decks and if you look at anki's competition - all of them offer pre-made decks as a key part of it. Medics have always used flashcards (many university bookshops sell physical flashcards for medics) and I don't each medical student would benefit from producing, eg, their own anatomy flashcards.
I would substitute "the material" for "the cards" in this sentence. Making the cards yourself is one way to do that, but it's not always the most time effective - imagine the extra work put onto a medical student having to make the cards for every subject they need to cover. That is what ankihub does and it seems to be very popular
But yeah: downloading the median deck off of ankiweb: very sub-optimal
If changing their SPS or the promises about an SPS motivate the learner, then great, they're putting in the work and time to learn, but I doubt that the effect of changing the SPS is as large as some people claim.
For example I used a tool that supposedly uses FSPS, but it did have a low maximum for the duration you don't have to practice a word, and no way for me to "ban" a word, so that it asks me in 6 months or something, and simple words kept coming back, especially after not learning for a few days. I didn't make much progress using the tool, even though it had FSPS.
Writing the cards is engaging with the cards for some small subset of the population. I am part of that audience. But most people are terrible at it, and it's not an easy skill to build.
Ther majority of people who are interested in Anki -- and the vast majority of normal human beings with nonzero willingness to pay, which is a very unique subset of the population with goals that tend to look like "Pass X exam by Y date so I can [get a job|earn my citizenship in a better country|...] -- just want good pedagogical material wrapped in some control harness so they can treat some fraction of their learning the same way they treat going to the gym. Show up, put in the reps, get results.
[1]: https://til.andrew-quinn.me/posts/the-second-wave-of-spaced-...
* exclusively quiz entire sentences
* introduce around 500 new words (a nice mix of nouns, verbs and adjectives)
* use a wide variety of grammatical constructs (including all conjugations of the new verbs),
* and that have audio of a native speaker reading the entire sentence after I "flip" the card
Such a deck needs to be thoroughly designed, and while I could choose the new words and then write software to make sure they are all used equally in sentences and no conjugations are missing, I actually can't easily make sure they are correct and I can't record the audio of the text.
My issue is, that I also don't know where to find the functionality for editing the template. I also cannot find it under deck "Options" in the desktop app. There is sooo much in the UI, that I think it is possible, that I am simply overlooking it somewhere. The docs you linked don't tell me where to find that. No screenshots of any UI are visible. Even now, after you telling the I need to edit templates, I still cannot find the functionality in the UI. I simply don't see it.
My feedback at this point would be to make this something, that is easily discoverable for the user, or add screenshots of how to get there to the docs and have keywords in the docs, that will ensure, that when I search for how to invert a deck, I will most likely find that page of the docs.
Is there a community / anki forum that hasn't been acquired?
Ftr Danish is a category 1 language, while Japanese is category 4 ("https://2009-2017.state.gov/m/fsi/sls/orgoverview/languages")
That said, even SM-2 is probably vastly superior to just not doing SRS at all.
I've definitely hit walls with Anki over the years, and while the community decks help a lot, it's really nice to just tell Claude "can you take this assignment my tutor gave me, extract all the infinitive verbs, and then make cloze style cards for conjugations at an A1/A2 level?" and get it all done in a couple minutes.
AnkiWeb also does not support an unlimited amount of data. It's evident that their storage requirements aren't infinite. They aggressively cull content. Not syncing for 6 months results in automatic deletion last I checked.
One thing I notice is that it does seem to have a large group of contributors. It's hard to imagine the desktop app will die completely.
In a way making the cards helps a ton to learn the content and decide what's really important to retain. On the other hand, it's such a slog that I usually end up relying on community cards, or skipping it altogether. The MCP idea may be a nice middle ground. Will give it a try for an upcoming exam.
Menu bar -> "Tools" -> "Manage Note Types" -> select a deck -> "Options" (in the side bar)
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\usepackage{amssymb,amsmath}
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\begin{document}
And why is it called "Note Type"? How does this concept relate to "Cards" or "Templates"?
Can you see, why one would have problems finding the correct setting?
EDIT: Now I found it under:
Menu bar -> "Tools" -> "Manage Note Types" -> select a deck -> "Cards" (in the side bar)
(1) The user has to know where to find that.
(2) The user has to know, that there is no short way to get to editing the attributes of the word shown, but instead, that they need to edit a template.
(3) The user has to know, where they will find the function to edit a template. I claim a normal user will not suspect this option to be hidden under "Note Types". What even is a note? Starting to use Anki, I would look for words like "Card", "Flashcard", "Translation", "Direction", "reverse", "training options", etc., but not "Note Types". It is a weird naming.
(4) A user will have to discover, that they are not supposed to click "Options", but "Cards". But that this brings up the card options, and that that contains the template, instead of the templates being something entirely separate, loosely coupled.
It is hard to include so much functionality in one tool. I understand that. But personally, I would have had to wade through every single menu item, to find this functionality, and this also explains, why in the past I have not been able to find this at all.
So I used AI to help me write this, I gotta be honest, but I have this TUI I use over SSH to access HN. I call it Nitpick!
It's GPL, athttps://github.com/fragmede/nitpick
It uses the HN API and algolia and golang with the bubble tea libraries. I'm parsing/scraping the threads page though, because reconstructing that from the API was proving to be a hassle.
It even supports logging in and commenting and reply notification!
I'm not totally sure where I land on using libraries (bubble tea) as they do bloat the program with unnecessary features, but I do like its simple text interface over using a web browser and a whole javascript engine for just rendering text.
Anyway, patches welcome!
:)
For me really learning a word means:
(1) Knowing how to say it.
(2) Knowing how to write it, meaning the Chinese characters, of course.
(3) Still remembering (1) and (2) after at least a month.
(4) Being able to actually use the word correctly.
They state in contrast:
We do not dismiss the work behind FSRS. It is a commendable open-source effort and a marked improvement over ancient algorithms like SM-2.
For context, Anki uses SM-2's algorithm (albeit apparently heavily modified for various special cases) if FSRS is not enabled.
You learn the words for a day (you're able to match the sounds and meaning to it). You will forget a lot of them tomorrow, so now you have to re-learn them. This is just how Anki works. You keep learning and re-learning until they stick for a prolonged period of time. It's common for Japanese learners to add between 20 or 30 words to their learning queue.
If you understand how Anki works, you will also understand how the word learning is used in relation to its flashcard mechanism.
I don't bother with the Hanzi past being able to recognize them. I want to be able to talk to people and, if I have to, use a pinyin keyboard to write basic sentences.
So only 1 & 4 are really relevant, 2 is what Anki is designed to do.
Would you say a native English speaker doesn't know the word "they're" if they keep spelling it "their" even if they use it correctly 100% of the time?
How does this opinion hold up if you consider that spelling wasn't standardized three centuries ago. Did no one know any English words until spelling got standardized in the 1800s? Do illiterate native speakers not truly know any words? Do children not know words?
How would your opinion change if you knew that plenty of native Japanese and Chinese speakers can't write the characters they can read anymore? If you don't have to physically write anymore, you lose the ability to write the characters. This is true of even educated adults in Japan and China. When I was a university student (I'm not Japanese), I could write kanji that my 30+yo Japanese friends had forgotten, but no one would say I knew how to use the words better than they could.
EDIT: And in any case, 10 new vocabulary words per day is extremely easy. In my experience having studied two foreign languages at the university level, that's pretty much the bare minimum expected to get an B in class.
And with all due respect, someone claiming they learn 20 words per day, in Mandarin, is an almost outrageous claim. If you think that "learning" is commonly agreed upon to mean "memorize for a couple of hours", then please show me the research into the meaning of the word, that proves your claim. While I have explicitly stated, what _my personal_ definition is, you are claiming to be knowledgeable about a "commonly agreed upon" definition. That is an impressive claim in itself. Let us all hear that definition, that is so commonly agreed upon, so that we can gain from that.
What you call learning, I call "training" or "practicing" or "revising". Now the onus is on you to prove to me, that indeed as you claim there is some commonly agreed upon definition, specifically in the area of learning Mandarin, that proves, that my definition is off.
And I will have you know, that I am learning Mandarin for some 10+ years, and have a lot of experience in that area. I know what counts and what is important.
Writing a language makes you more skilled at living in the modern world. It's not a threshold past which you must travel to count as a speaker of that language.
Bad example, but to roll with it: In that case I would say they don't know it properly, since it is apparent, that in their mind there is no difference between "their" and "they're" or even "they are".
> How does this opinion hold up if you consider that spelling wasn't standardized three centuries ago. Did no one know any English words until spelling got standardized in the 1800s? Do illiterate native speakers not truly know any words? Do children not know words?
I am basing my personal definition of when I consider a word "learned" on reality, not on some "what if". If I had to map that idea of no spelling standardization to Chinese characters, then it would mean, that characters don't have standardized lines/components/parts. If there was no standard, then I guess I would consider this kind of making up how to write it on the fly sufficient for having learned a word. Thankfully there is standardization, so that is not a reality we live in.
Since I strive to not be an illiterate, I do not count being illiterate as having learned a word.
> EDIT: And in any case, 10 new vocabulary words per day is extremely easy. In my experience having studied two foreign languages at the university level, that's pretty much the bare minimum expected to get an B in class.
That depends very much on the language and course, but if it is your major, then sure, such a time commitment seems reasonable, since it is the thing you are doing. If your major is anything else and you just take an additional language course, where I come from you have once or twice a week that course. Then maybe 1 or 2 weeks you finish one chapter of a course book, which might have 20 new words, so that makes 20 words in 1-2 weeks, not in 2 days.
Typically for Mandarin the speed will also be slower than other easier to learn languages. For example at school I almost never had to learn vocabulary in English or Spanish. I just saw the words and memorized them somehow. Usage in class and often their sound and structure was sufficient , and always had good grades, often very good grades in those languages and always had good grades, often very good grades in those languages.
It doesn't work like that with Chinese characters. You are not gonna learn them (including writing them) by just looking at them a few times, unless you got an extraordinary visual, almost photographic memory. I consider myself already to have a pretty good visual memory, but still I need to put in the time and effort, and 20 words a day is way out of my league. But then again it was already cleared up in another comment, that the OP cuts out writing entirely. That's definitely a choice one can make and explains how 20 newly added words (I would still debate that that's "learned") make any sense.
When people in the language learning community say they "learn 20 words a day", they are referring to New Cards Added. It is a metric of input and initial encoding, not guaranteed permanent storage.
In Anki, "Learning" is literally a specific phase (the red cards). You introduce the card, you pass the initial threshold, and then the algorithm handles the retention over the subsequent weeks. You are conflating the process of learning (adding new information) with the result of mastery (long-term active recall).
Why do you keep harping on Mandarin in particular? Do you think it's harder than other languages to learn new words? It's not like you have to learn new hanzi for every word. Most are compounds. It's like being surprised someone easily learned how to spell "lighthouse" because it's got a silent "gh" and a silent "e" and the "ou" is not pronounced the way you'd expect, and the "th" in the middle isn't pronounced like "th" should be.
The learner already knew how to spell "light" and "house" so it was effortless to learn "lighthouse."
My experience with Japanese is that you hit around 800 or so kanji and new vocab comes very easily. Even new kanji come extremely easily because they're all made up of the same parts ("radicals").
EdIT: One hour a day devoted to language study will yield 20 new vocab words a day that, over time, you'll have around 85% recall, which translates to over 6,000 new words per year (over 7,000 but then you adjust downward because of the 85% factor).
The issue is that people want to learn a language in five minutes a day, but they don't bat an eye at playing a video game an hour a day to be able to beat some level. I remember playing for hours to be able to get good at 1942 on the NES back in the early 90s.
By cutting out the memorization of Hanzi, I am able to accelerate my actual goal of having conversations with people.
In Silicon Valley speak, I think the term would be "ruthless prioritization" .
The original claim was about 20 Mandarin words.
> The learner already knew how to spell "light" and "house" so it was effortless to learn "lighthouse."
This kind of comparison doesn't work properly for learning Chinese characters. Simply combining characters like that only works ~half of the time or less.
> EdIT: One hour a day devoted to language study will yield 20 new vocab words a day that, over time, you'll have around 85% recall, which translates to over 6,000 new words per year (over 7,000 but then you adjust downward because of the 85% factor).
Delusional for Mandarin, unless you have some kind of special brain putting you in some 0.001% of the population. Not even natives learn that many words in a year. That many characters they might know when reaching university, and then later forget many again. Most native adults don't know that many.
> The issue is that people want to learn a language in five minutes a day, but they don't bat an eye at playing a video game an hour a day to be able to beat some level. I remember playing for hours to be able to get good at 1942 on the NES back in the early 90s.
Well, at least on that we agree. If one doesn't put in the time and effort, then the results will reflect that.
Unless you're applying for something in China, you don't need to know how to write hanzi ever, except for very one-off instances like "I can write happy new year in Chinese"
You know how many times I've written "real" Japanese by hand since 2005? Zero. I've written my name and stuff, sometimes I'll write 愛 to show my daughters. Nothing else. Because it's a worthless skill unless you live in Japan. Not even visiting. You live there.
Of course I type all the time. But typing is speaking + reading. It's not writing. You type phonetically (i.e., you know how to say the word), and then you hit spacebar until the correct kanji comes up (i.e., you can read kanji).