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Using Incremental Reading For Fast Anki Sentence Creation — 10 Comments

  1. This seems so confusing and complicated I don’t even know what’s going on. No thanks, I’ll stick with the 10k sentences method, which has proven to work for many people

    • If you’re asking about Incremental Reading, it’s a nifty feature of SuperMemo that has had an Anki port for the last four years or so. With it, we can create sentence cards very quickly. SuperMemo’s explanation can be found here:
      https://www.supermemo.com/help/read.htm

      If you’re asking about this article, it’s a step-by-step guide on how to configure and start using Incremental Reading in Anki.

      If you have no idea what’s going on, I can try to explain things again, if you’d like.

  2. Thanks a lot for the Article!
    I have thought alot about using incremental reading for various things, but the usual explanations make it sound way more difficult than this :)

  3. > SuperMemo’s explanation can be found here: https://www.supermemo.com/help/read.htm

    Ah, that SuperMemo article helps a lot with context. I also wasn’t really sure what “incremental reading” was, but now have a general idea.

    As far as using it for Japanese study, I’m still not sure I fully grok the process. So you’re essentially pasting in entire articles, then as you read them you’re pulling out important bits and pieces to make cards with?

    Doesn’t this get tricky when a sentence has many unknown pieces? Does it track your progress as you go? Also, how does this interplay with your “normal” Anki cards?

    I also don’t quite get how this helps to read “thousands of articles at once”, which the SuperMemo article mentions, but that’s a bit beside the point I guess.

    I’d also be curious to hear your opinion about the various browser plugins and so on that can extract text from sites and make cards automatically. This seems very similar to that, with the major difference I guess being that you’re reading articles within Anki in this case, right?

    Anyway, thanks for the article! Seems like a very interesting process… if a bit intimidating :D

  4. > So you’re essentially pasting in entire articles, then as you read them you’re pulling out important bits and pieces to make cards with?
    Pretty much, yes.

    > Doesn’t this get tricky when a sentence has many unknown pieces?
    Yes. If a sentence has many unknowns, I usually break the sentence up into several cards, one for each unknown. k+1, and all that.

    > Does it track your progress as you go?
    What you’ve extracted gets highlighted, so you know not to reread that part. In addition, when you continue reading a piece of text, the extension (usually) automatically scrolls to where you stopped off.

    > Also, how does this interplay with your “normal” Anki cards?
    I usually keep Incremental Reading cards and ‘normal’ Anki cards in separate decks, so they don’t interact.

    If you put normal cards and Incremental Reading cards in the same deck (or in subdecks of the same superdeck), Incremental Reading cards act just like regular new cards.

    I’m wary of putting Incremental Reading cards in the same deck as normal cards, though. All of your normal cards will show up in the Incremental Reading Scheduler, and Incremental Reading seems to override their normal due dates. (Don’t worry if this paragraph didn’t make sense.)

    > I also don’t quite get how this helps to read “thousands of articles at once”, which the SuperMemo article mentions, but that’s a bit beside the point I guess.
    The SuperMemo article seems to be referring to SRS’s in general, and Incremental Reading helps create those cards. I guess that ‘showing a flashcard occasionally’ counts as ‘reading’ for them.

    > I’d also be curious to hear your opinion about the various browser plugins and so on that can extract text from sites and make cards automatically. This seems very similar to that, with the major difference I guess being that you’re reading articles within Anki in this case, right?
    The only extractor I’ve found is Rikaisama’s Real Time Import addon. Although it adds definitions automatically, I don’t use it because it only extracts words, not sentences. Are there others?

    Yes, this is very similar to browser text extractors. There are other fancier features (highlighting without adding cards, extracting to another Incremental Reading card), but I don’t use them.

    • Cool, this helps a lot — thanks again!

      > The only extractor I’ve found is Rikaisama’s Real Time Import addon. Although it adds definitions automatically, I don’t use it because it only extracts words, not sentences. Are there others?

      I actually haven’t used any of these tools myself, which is part of the reason why I’m curious about them. I’ve mostly taken the masochistic by-hand card creation route, though recently I’ve picked up some of the Jalup decks as well. (Which are awesome, btw.)

    • >The only extractor I’ve found is Rikaisama’s Real Time Import addon. Although it adds definitions automatically, I don’t use it because it only extracts words, not sentences. Are there others?

      Actually you can extract sentences into anki using Rikaisama. You just have to edit the “Save Format” section and add the desired save tokens you want. The default is $d$t$r$t$n

      $d = dictionary form
      $t = tab
      $r = reading
      $n = definition

      If you want to add the option of auto adding sentences, just add $s or $b if you want the sentence with a blank where the word was supposed to be. The have the save format keys in that page too. Here is an example of how I used it with this format using a Japanese definition mode (press O at the hover word) .

      噴火 ふんか (n,vs,adj-no) 〈スル〉 火山が爆発して,溶岩や火山灰をふき出すこと. 鹿児島県の口永良部島では、ことし5月29日に大きな噴火がありました。

      Source: http://www3.nhk.or.jp/news/easy/k10010352321000/k10010352321000.html

      td; lr: Add “$d$t$r$t$n$t$s” to the Save Format without the quotation marks.

  5. This is the first time of heard of incremental reading. It sounds interesting and I would like to give it try. Does anyone have good sources for getting articles? http://www3.nhk.or.jp/news/easy/ and Coscom.co.jp seem like good starting places. I like the idea of using encyclopedia articles but I think ja.wikipedia.org might be a bit over my head. I found poplardia.net which seems to require a subscription. Has anyone used this? Does anyone know of a good online children’s encyclopedia?

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