If it’s not obvious from some of my other posts, I’ve been learning Japanese. It’s pretty tough. I’ve reached the point where I can read Japanese books fairly well (if very slowly), but whenever I do this–read full books in Japanese–I never know if I’m quite reading everything correctly. I can misread an entire book and not realize it. (Arguably I could do the same in English, but let’s pretend for the moment I’m blissfully unaware of my own limits.)

To make up for this worry of mine, I’ve taken up the entirely not at all nerdy or uncool hobby of playing Japanese RPGs in their original Japanese. This is cool and impressive and awesome. This is the first thing I tell strangers about me. The reason I do this is actually pretty simple: RPGs are not only incredibly text heavy–especially JRPGs, which I swear to God never shut up–but also because if I read something incorrectly, the game will give me feedback right away. If I misread what a spell does, for example, I will see my mistake immediately, because the game will react to my input.

Yeah, anyways, the point is: I had a lot of difficulty with …

Something I’ve never posted about here (I never post here) is that I’ve been working to learn Japanese since January of last year. I use a great flashcard program to study–Anki, a spaced repetition study app–which allows you to create your own html/css templates, and as long as I’ve used the app, I’ve been tinkering with a useful template for my study needs, specifically one that allows me to focus my study on a lot sentence reading and listening practice, but to keep my information well-organized. Yep, well-organized. I don’t know why, but I find that important.

I wrote some quick documentation and posted my template to github. You can check it out and download it here. You can also read the whole documentation here, because I’ve decided to post it below. Who knows why. I guess I just feel the need to fill this blog.

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Adaptive Vobabulary Flashcards for Anki 2.0+

A useful vocabulary flashcard template for Anki that creates cards for variety of study methods from one note.

Note: because I’ve been using Anki to study Japanese from English, all examples on this page will reference either Japanese or English. For your own use, …