I recently started using Anki, after years of knowing about it.

My question is, when I change computers in the future, how will I be able to save all of the data?

What I like about Skritter is that all of our data is saved on the website

You can set up and sync to an ankiweb account: https://ankiweb.net/

If you make a user, your decks will be synced to Anki web every time you open/close the program.

cool, thanks guys

alright, I just went to https://ankiweb.net/
and I signed up. Now how do I get everything to sync to the web? I opened my Anki and looked around, but didn't see anything

Bohan,

Just out of curiosity what do you typically do with Anki? Do you find it the best way to quickly review vocab without worrying about writing?

I have just been focusing on being able to write about 3k characters, but would be interested in Anki has other benefits.

Top right corner of the main window, there is a sync button, which will ask you to login.

@Frank I just started using Anki, and I'm actually using it for English. If you're curious, there is another thread all about it:

http://ios.skritter.com/forum/topic?id=290392993&comments=19

@Laspimon thanks

No problem, Bohan.

Sounds like Ankiweb is working for you but it's worth knowing Anki does save your decks to c:/User/YOUR NAME/Documents/Anki (if your on windows7). You can simply copy the entire "Anki" directory from your 'My Documents' directory to a new computer and it'll work fine. Syncing to Ankiweb is my preferred choice but if you don't have the internet or want a concrete backup that's where to look.

> "Just out of curiosity what do you typically do with Anki?"

For me it's sentences! I currently have about 1,200 sentences with full audio that contains Hanzi, English, Audio. I test all three directions (Hanzi -> Audio+English, Audio -> Hanzi + English, English -> Hanzi+Audio). I do have some random words individual characters/words in there for stuff that I want to learn but haven't got to in Skritter yet but not many.

I used to only learn words, and at the time it seemed a fine way to go. But once I switched to learning sentences my speaking ability has gone way up. I also try to write on lang-8 regularly and put all the corrected sentences into the deck. That way I'm memorising sentences that are guaranteed to have useful vocab - since I literally just wanted to say/write it.

For learning individual characters, skritter wins hands down, but once you can write a character an anki sentence deck (you've constructed yourself) is the best way I've found to learn how to USE words you can write.

@kaysik is that something you created yourself or did you download a list already available. I think this would be a good way of converting my vocabulary into better spoken Chinese, whih I really new to concentrate on now.

@夏普本: I manually constructed my sentence deck. Early on I tried getting one of the public "10,000 Chinese sentences" deck's but a lot of the sentences were way above my level or not something I had any interest in saying. Also most of the big ones are auto generated so they have errors in translation/pinyin and no audio. Some people love them but they weren't for me.

Since I started made my own, it's been much better. Also since I'm still at the A2/B1 level it's fairly easy to find new high frequency words to learn. About 80% of my sentences have come from a routine that usually goes like this:
1) Try to write post on http://lang-8.com
2) Need a new word I don't yet know
3) Look up how to say it in http://chinesepod.com/tools/glossary/ (you do NOT need a Chinese pod login to use the glossary - it's awesome for finding straight forward example sentences with native audio for most words).
4) Find the word I'm looking for, put some of the example Chinese pod sentences (with audio) into my deck.
5) Write the new word into my post on lang-8
6) Next day check lang-8 corrections, when I got something wrong add the corrected sentences to Anki.
6.5) If any of my more helpful language partners are online get them to read the sentences for the audio. But if nobody is online or I'm lazy I use google translate audio* plugin for Anki to just auto generate the audio.
7) Add any new characters to skritter.

This way I'm always learning words that I've genuinely tried to use. I'm also passively practicing correct grammar - now when I talk I almost never think about where words go, they just flow. While I only know around 700 to 800 words I'm finding conversation MUCH easier than when I was only studying words alone. I'm still terrible mind you haha, but I'm far less terrible. Sentences definitely helped a lot with actual conversation and my general comfort with the language.


(*The google translate voice is robotic and does make mistakes but I find bad audio far better than no audio. Also it's not really that much worse than some Chinese accents :P. I also usually have real audio for an example sentence or two from chinese pod glossary, that way I never to have ONLY google translate audio for every instance of a word.)

PS. Sorry about hijacking the thread ...

You can also have Anki store its stuff in Dropbox so that it doesn't matter which computer you access it from. (But syncing with Ankiweb is better.)

Anki is good for sentences if you want to get into it with making your own deck and setting up the card types how you want it. You might also try the new sentence study on Skritter. On beta, Scott just set it up so that when you add a sentence to My Words, it skips the writing and tone prompts, so you can do reading and definition prompts on sentences within Skritter now, too, and add them to lists and such. (Doesn't give you the other directions that kaysik tests in his Anki decks; might be something we could think about.)

Thanks for that @kaysik it does sound like a fairly time consuming process. I have added that other list you mentioned so will give that a go until I learn how to really use Anki.

Look forward to any opportunities to study sentences on here as well.

Nick, I think the Dropbox method has been outdated since Anki 2.0.

@nick, yes I believe Laspimon is correct, the Anki Dropbox functionality was phased out because of problems with the Dropbox API.