
Show HN: MDAnki – convert Markdown to Anki cards - rudnek
https://github.com/ashlinchak/mdanki
======
tunesmith
I basically ruined myself for Anki. I started like gangbusters, and also
created some _really_ cool jazz music theory decks for myself that have
lilypond notation snippets and sound samples of various chord qualities and
advanced jazz modes. And this is on top of other subjects like ML, scala,
logarithms, etc.

And then... I hit this mathematical limit where I just couldn't keep up. You
can't add 20 new cards a day for any length of time without the review cycle
getting overwhelming. I'm not sure it's even physically possible to Anki full
recall of everything learned in a college course - each class would need to be
much longer than a term to keep up with the review.

One solution is to just keep plugging away, reviewing what you can and hoping
the things you answer correctly will relieve the pressure as they come up less
frequently. But since you're late on many card, recall sucks and I never
really made much headway.

I also have a really hard time retiring cards. It's like deciding to cross
things off your TODO list that you'll never do, you always want to keep it on
thinking you might do it someday. Same with a not very relevant piece of info,
it's right in front of you, it still feels like it might be useful to know...

~~~
s_m_t
Why were you adding 20 new cards a day? IMO its better to adjust your new card
rate based on your retention rate. Your ideal retention rate probably depends
on how you react to the "stress" of missing cards. Personally it would majorly
stress me out if my retention rate was below 80%, I ideally liked to keep it
around 90-95% because for me this was where it went from feeling like work to
actually being fun and exciting.

I might go for a couple of days without adding anything, do a couple days
adding 5, add 10, 15, 20, or even 30 depending on the circumstances.

~~~
elliotec
20 new cards per day to review is the default. You can add as many or as few
as you want but if you didn't change the default it will put 20 in your review
queue daily.

~~~
sjy
It’s only going to put 20 new cards in your review queue daily if you have a
huge backlog of unseen cards, which will only happen if you mass import a
whole bunch of pre-made cards, which is not recommended. Actually creating 20
new cards a day would imply a pretty heavy study schedule.

~~~
andrewzah
> It’s only going to put 20 new cards in your review queue daily if you have a
> huge backlog of unseen cards

Correct. However, using a huge premade deck is not a bad idea in the sense
that it's a huge time saver.

For me, creating an anki card takes between 1-2 minutes, depending on how slow
the dictionaries (plural) are. So, 30-60 words per minute (45 avg) means it
would take me almost 4.5 hours to input a measly 200 words.

I can write down 200 new words from one episode of a tv show. You can see
where this is going. For Korean, about 5-6k words are recommended to begin
having non-basic discussions. 5k words at 45 words/hour is ~110 hours.

Instead, I suggest using a parent deck that has a premade deck + your personal
deck as children. This lets you have the best of both systems. You can use the
Hoochie Mama! plugin [0] to properly randomize your review queue for child
decks. Anki by default pulls cards in order from child decks.

Note: All of this assumes that your pre-made deck is of good quality. I can't
speak about other languages, but Evita's Korean deck (5.8k cards) is sorted by
frequency. It's fairly good, at least until you get to more of a intermediate
level.

[0]:
[https://ankiweb.net/shared/info/1460733408](https://ankiweb.net/shared/info/1460733408)

~~~
sjy
It also assumes that you are trying to learn thousands of new words in a
foreign language, which requires less effort per card than almost any other
exercise. Humans are natural language learners, after all. The OP was
struggling to deal with 20 new cards a day on music theory and computer
science.

------
knubie
If this interests you I built an entire SRS app around this idea:
[https://mochi.cards/](https://mochi.cards/)

~~~
fudged71
How long has this been around? Surprised I haven't seen it before! Fantastic
work. I would love if I could use this with Roam Research somehow

~~~
tptacek
Seconded. This looks really nicely done.

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thrownaway954
maybe i'm just a jerk, but it bothers me when someone posts a project and
doesn't link to an example of give a full description. i have no idea what
anki cards are so i googled it and it's a pretty cool little open source flash
card program. most people aren't going to do the research so it's best to have
an explanation what all the components are. you don't have to be overly
verbose, just a one liner explanation is fine most of the time.

~~~
deckar01
Technical writing is a skill. Little things like linking related topics
requires foresight into the range of knowledge your audience could have. It is
easy to assume everyone shares the same knowledge you do.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curse_of_knowledge](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curse_of_knowledge)

~~~
alanbernstein
This is absolutely true, but you can seldom go wrong assuming that proper
nouns (like Anki) should be accompanied by links.

------
laurieg
I've spent many years using Anki and I have thousands of cards. I love it but
I notice a few very common failure modes:

1\. Putting far too many cards in a deck.

2\. Putting in information that you want to learn rather than information you
have _already learned_.

3\. Using large pre-made decks (which is really just 1 and 2 together).

If you're planning on using Anki longterm (such as for language learning) then
keep the number of new cards low. Something in the range of 3-5 a day is
totally fine.

You should put things into Anki after you have learnt them. In general I
suggest putting in information at the end of a study session when you feel
like you know it so well you couldn't possibly forget it. Cards should feel a
bit too easy _when you create them_. By the time you come to review you will
have forgotten a little and the difficulty will be perfect.

------
jlelonm
Oooh, neat! Reminds me of this addon:

LaTeX Note Importer:
[https://ankiweb.net/shared/info/1199027445](https://ankiweb.net/shared/info/1199027445)

I'm almost sold on downloading this, but I have a question.

Let's say I create notes.md with 2 cards:

## hey

hi

## hello

howdy

But, then I modify card #2:

## hello modified

howdy modified

and recreate the deck.

Does the 2nd card that has now been modified get treated as a whole new card?
(In other words, if I've been using card 2 to study, do I have to start all
over?)

If this is NOT the case, I am absolutely sold.

~~~
rudnek
MDAnki produces a file with a deck for importing to Anki. Every new import
will generate new cards. I don't know anything if it's possible to make
updating cards during the import. I'll try to investigate it. Thanks for this
note!

~~~
kfoley
This would change a lot of the current design but one option is to use
AnkiConnect[0], it provides a network interface for interacting with Anki and
creating/updating cards.

There's a somewhat similar project[1] that lets you use Org mode to make
cards. It uses Emacs so there may not be too much you can apply but could be
useful to take a look at.

[0] [https://github.com/FooSoft/anki-connect](https://github.com/FooSoft/anki-
connect) [1] [https://github.com/louietan/anki-
editor](https://github.com/louietan/anki-editor)

------
musically_ut
Shameless self-plug: I created [anki-slides-
import]([https://github.com/musically-ut/anki-slides-
import](https://github.com/musically-ut/anki-slides-import)) to convert slides
into Anki decks.

The program requires notes (written in Markdown, with one section for each
slide) along with the pdf slides and it produces a deck which can be practised
in Anki. It may prove to be useful for someone here.

------
echelon
This is neat!

I did a similar thing to manage my Japanese vocabulary. I encoded it in TOML
and compiled it to Anki decks. [1]

There is a lot of room for utilities like this. Managing decks in the Anki
interface and persisting them as zipped sqlite is a headache.

[1] [http://github.com/echelon/nihongo](http://github.com/echelon/nihongo)
(It's a bit of a mess, sorry.)

~~~
eindiran
I did something similar, but to handle orgmode files:

[https://github.com/eindiran/orgmode-to-
anki](https://github.com/eindiran/orgmode-to-anki)

~~~
alanbernstein
Ooh, neat. How is image support?

------
zikani_03
Thanks for this! Going to be useful - I am still getting used to Anki and the
process of adding Cards sometimes seems like drudgery.

------
r-zip
This is very nice. I recently tried creating a bunch of Anki flash cards for
theorems in real analysis, but found it too tedious. Is there any support
(current or planned) for converting latex fragments?

~~~
rudnek
Yes, LaTeX on my Redmine board.

------
ausjke
great stuff, was looking for something similar for a long while, time to try
it again.

