The Anki Dilemma

04 Jan, 2025

I hate Anki.

I've tried to get myself to like it multiple times. And I do mean multiple times. Below is a heat map of the last few years.

As you can see, consistency is not the name of the game. With it being a new year now, you might expect that I go and say something like "This year, I'll keep up with Anki!" but I assure you that will not be the case.

I bring this up because while I can never consistently stick with it, I do like the idea of Anki. The little experimentations on card types and rep counts always was much more fun than actually doing the reps themselves. Which brings me to the topic of today's post.

I want to try and do some Anki this year. How much and how often is up for debate but the reason why I'd like to do more Anki has to do with physical manga. See, I would much rather prefer to read physicals than read something online (a kindle / e-reader is a nice medium but let's leave that aside for now).¹ The issue of course, is that if you run into a word you don't know, you'd have to manually search up the word. Then the question becomes, what should I do with these lists of words? Well why not Anki them?² The answer to that of course, is that I hate Anki. So what to do?

This is where fun experimentation time comes in, AJATT style! I've always thought the ideas of MCDs³ were cool and while I don't necessarily think that would be best for this situation, I would like to find something that feels just as fresh and just as easy to make for Anki cards.⁴

How I'll actually create the cards or what the card type will be or how I'll rep them, I have no clue yet. Whether I'll follow up with this or not, I also don't know. The only thing that's clear now is that

1. I'd like to read more physical manga
2. I'd like to review the words that I end up searching up in some way, shape, or form⁵

Anki just happens to be the tool that I know could do number two well. Stay tuned for some updates in the future! Maybe!