It’s the new year, and Anki got a little upgrade to celebrate a new beginning!
I can now click on each word separately to reveal their pronunciation and meaning. A second click will play the TTS for this word only.
It’s useful for sentences with several words, because sometimes I feel overwhelmed with the list, and revealing words one by one as I try to recall them makes the task less daunting. I also don’t always listen to the full sentence before starting answering, especially for older cards that I know well. So I can now check my answers as the audio reaches each new word. And being able to click a second time to get the audio is great to listen to a word in isolation, though I don’t use it that often.
As I said in my previous post on Anki, TTS is random between two voices that I selected.
And here’s an example of a leech card. I’m posting them here so I’ll be able to come back to this post at the end of 2026 to see what changed in my cards during the year.
As for my goals with Anki this year… of course it’s to study every day and build a new streak. I know it’s probably not going to happen, but I will try nonetheless because it’s so satisfying to see the calendar filled with blue dots.
The major change though is to reduce the count of new cards from 10 to 5, because 10 didn’t work for me at all. The problem was not so much to learn 10 new cards per day as to add enough new cards to sustain it. So there were periods when I learnt a lot of new cards, and times when I could go an entire month without a single new entry. Hopefully it will be more even and smooth with 5 new cards per day.
And for 2026, I want to work on adding words on a regular basis, so that I don’t go for too long without learning something new.
There’s a 365 check sheet at the end of the Hobonichi Weeks but before the blank pages. I don’t know if it’s intended to keep track of a streak, or if you’re just supposed to check the days as they pass, but I’ve decided to use it for Anki. I know there’s a calendar in Anki, but it’s rewarding to check the days myself, kind of a small reward for studying Anki every day. The dark green is for days when I added new words to Anki, and the light green is for days when I studied Anki and learnt new words. The yellow colour is for days when I studied Anki but without any new cards. If I skip a day, I won’t colour it at all.
I think that it will be particularly interesting to see how many yellow days I got.
At the moment, I am working on the Nod-Krai Archon Quest, but I am not super motivated. I love Nod-Krai, but the AQ is so daunting, I feel like I will never be able to catch up. I just started Act 2, and it was the chapter centred around the Lightkeepers. I think they said in the SP that Illuga, who is a Lightkeeper, will be present in the new World Quests (if I understood correctly?), so I’m thinking that it might be a good thing to study Act 2 before next patch release (next Wednesday). That’s what I’ll be busy with the next days!
Lantern Rite is also just around the corner, and if the story is great (and I’m sure it will be!), I’ll study it and add it to Anki.
Happy New Year! 🎇
About
I’m learning Japanese, Korean and Chinese to read mystery novels and play video games in these languages.
Learning languages has always been one of my favourite hobbies, but I’m not a social person, I don’t like to meet new people and make friends, this is just not me. I keep hearing that languages are meant for communication, that we have to actively use them, talk with natives, etc. and for a long time, I thought it was weird to learn languages just to read books, with zero interest in communication.
Now I don’t really care what people think, and this blog helped me a lot to stop doubting myself and just do what I enjoy doing.
Do you know that you’re not using Anki the way you’re supposed to? You’re supposed test one word with one card so that card should be 3 cards
Yes I know, what I’m doing is very far from Anki’s original purpose of keeping the cards simple. I wanted to try something else because I got sick of my Japanese deck that was exactly that (one card = one word), And it was just easier to use Anki rather than creating something from scratch.