Chinese support add-on

Anki Add-ons
1

First, I want to say a massive thank you for creating the Chinese support add-on. The auto-generation of pinyin, translations, and audio is an absolute game-changer for learners like me, and I use it every single day. It has saved me countless hours.

I’m writing to you because I’m trying to create a powerful new workflow by combining AI-generated flashcards (from my textbooks) with your add-on’s automation, and I’ve run into an interesting conundrum.

The Situation:

  • When I manually add a new card using my “Chinese - Basic” note type and type Hanzi into the ‘Hanzi’ field, your add-on works perfectly. The Pinyin, English, and audio fields populate automatically, as expected. It’s brilliant.

  • However, when I use an AI to generate a list of vocabulary and sentences into a .txt file and then bulk import this file into Anki, the auto-generation function doesn’t trigger. The cards are created successfully with the Chinese characters in the ‘Hanzi’ field, but all the other fields remain blank.

Troubleshooting I’ve tried:

  1. I’ve double- and triple-checked that the import is mapped to the correct “Chinese - Basic” note type and the correct ‘Hanzi’ field.

  2. Thinking the add-on might need empty fields to work with, I simplified my import file to contain only one field (the Hanzi), mapping it to the ‘Hanzi’ field and leaving the others to be populated by the add-on. Unfortunately, the result was the same.

This leads me to a core question about how the add-on functions: Is the auto-generation feature currently designed to trigger only upon manual entry or editing within Anki’s card editor?

It seems it might not be hooking into the bulk import process. If so, is there a way to manually trigger the add-on to process a batch of selected cards after they’ve been imported? Or, if not, could I humbly suggest this as a potential future feature?

Being able to combine bulk AI generation with your add-on’s powerful capabilities would be a revolutionary workflow for Chinese learners using Anki. It would truly take language learning automation to the next level.

Any insight or advice you could offer would be hugely appreciated.

Thank you again for your incredible work and for your time.

BTW, here is the video instruction I used to bulk import flashcards: How to Make Anki Flashcards 10x Faster with AI (for free!) by Ray Amjad

2 Likes
2

This is not related at all to the Contanki thread you posted in, so I moved it to its own thread. I’m not sure which “Chinese Support” add-on you’re asking about, but make sure you’ve checked the add-on page to see if there’s a better place to direct these comments/questions.

2 Likes
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Hi thanks for the feedback, is the bulk fill option not working? (Anki menubar → Chinese → bulk fill → All)

1 Like
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Thank you. I’m using a desktop app. The .txt files I created aren’t translated by the add-on. I tried the bulk fill > All, but only got a debug profile, pasted below:

Anki 25.09.2 (3890e12c) (ao)
Python 3.13.5 Qt 6.9.1 PyQt 6.9.1
Platform: Windows-10-10.0.19042-SP0

Traceback (most recent call last):
File “C:XXXXXXXX\Anki2\addons21\1240761427\fill.py”, line 99, in bulk_fill_all
‘hanzi’: get_hanzi(dict(note)),
~~~~~~~~~^^^^^^^^^^^^
File “C:XXXXXXXX\Anki2\addons21\1240761427\hanzi.py”, line 52, in get_hanzi
return cleanup(get_first(config[‘fields’][‘hanzi’], note))
File “C:XXXXXXXX\Anki2\addons21\1240761427\util.py”, line 70, in cleanup
raise ValueError(text)
ValueError: None

===Add-ons (active)===
(add-on provided name [Add-on folder, installed at, version, is config changed])
Chinese Support V4 - auto fill Chinese cards Fixed by Shige [‘1240761427’, 2025-08-04T12:18, ‘None’, mod]
More Overview Stats 21 [‘738807903’, 2025-02-17T15:14, ‘None’, ‘’]
PassFail 2 Remove the Easy and Hard buttons [‘876946123’, 2024-06-03T20:56, ‘None’, ‘’]
Review Heatmap [‘1771074083’, 2022-06-29T20:43, ‘None’, ‘’]

===IDs of active AnkiWeb add-ons===
1240761427 1771074083 738807903 876946123

===Add-ons (inactive)===
(add-on provided name [Add-on folder, installed at, version, is config changed])

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Have you already set the notetype correctly? This add-on requires the field names to match exactly.

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Yes, Chinese basic

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Maybe it’s a bug, I’ll try look into it.

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8

Thank you. Also why it doesn’t translate sentences from hanzi into english? I put in a sentence and it only translates the first one or two characters of the entire sentence (the audio portion, though works properly and reads the whole sentence, pinyin too).

1 Like