The link is here: Anki xiehanzi
You input characters, and it creates a deck.
This is the only way I’ve found to select hanzi individually as I decide I want to practice them with no cost, and that’s been the one thing holding me back from diving in to Chinese so I’m really excited about this. But I’m having trouble tweaking it to my needs and as a non-programmer who’s never tinkered with Anki card formatting I’m doing a lot of work to weak results and I need help.
By default the deck is made to show you the outline and have you trace over it.
I want a deck with no clues on the front of the card so I’m forced to recall the hanzi from memory each time I see the card (audio plays on front and back, as well as zhuyin at the top).
You can see the default card formatting if you input a hanzi yourself. In case you don’t have a quick way to throw one in, just copy this one: 这).
Note that I picked this Hanzi because it differs in traditional and simplified (the character you see above is simplified; in traditional, it looks like this: 這), and I want to test myself writing both forms from memory.
In the option button on the left under the drawing area on the front of the card, you can bring up an options menu on the left of the screen, and there’s a setting that swaps back and forth between traditional and simplified. Currently, this button is not working for me: if I switch it over to traditional, the prompt still only responds to me drawing 这.
The best solution I’ve found for getting the clues off of the front of the card is to change the color of the outline to match the color of the background. This still leaves some ugly gaps in the grid lines covering the drawing area. You’ll see this if you paste my edits in to the formatting which I’ve linked below.
At least on PC (I haven’t checked mobile yet) I can get rid of this by clicking the options (left, under the drawing area, bringing a list of choices up on the left side of the screen) and turning off the outline. It would have been sufficient to just check this each time I open the deck, the trouble is I’ll be opening the deck a lot with just one or two hanzi in the queue, and seeing the outline while I go through the menu to turn this off ruins the whole memory challenge. But maybe someone knows of an easy way to just address this setting in the coding and not take the duct tape approach I just did of changing the color of the outline.
I also found I couldn’t remove the traditional and simplified hanzi from the front of the card without making the drawing section disappear. The duct tape approach I’ve resorted to so far is to simply put a lot of space at the bottom of the card, and place them beneath that. This way I can scroll down and see them if I want, but at least the memory challenge I’m after isn’truined by seeing them immediately.
One last simple problem with the Anki part of this: I’ve created some duct tape formatting (I link my formatting below) that mostly works for me, but currently as I generate new cards on the website and import them into my deck, they don’t automatically take on the formatting.
Here are the awful duct tape solution templates I’m currently using: front template https://justpaste.it/grb6l ; styling JustPaste.it - Share Text & Images the Easy Way ; back template is just < div id=“back” >{{FrontSide}}"
Lastly, a question for the Githubbers: I’m putting a lot of effort into curating this specific deck, and I can already see some things aren’t maintained in it from a couple years ago. Specifically, the blog has instructions for making your own custom formats… but it contains a link to the coding that’s used for the handwriting input, but that link is broken, which is the source of much of my current difficulty. That means I feel anxious relying on the URL at Anki xiehanzi to stay up and allow me to keep feeding hanzi in to my deck. Is there a way for me to duplicate this web page on my own computer or back it up in some other way?
There’s a lot going on in there so summary :
- Is there a better way to hide the simplified and traditional characters from the front of the card, without making the handwriting input section go away, besides shoving them down at the deep bottom of the card as I have done?
- Does anyone see a way to make the ability to swap between writing the traditional and simplified character forms work, on these cards?
- Is there a better way to have the outline of the hanzi to be drawn automatically hidden from the front of the card besides changing the color of the outline to match the background (creating ugly gaps in the grid that only disappear when opening options and then checking to make the outline go away)?
- How do I make newly imported cards automatically adopt the formatting I’ve created here?
- I’m setting myself to rely a lot on this one website on Github that I’m not sure I trust to stay maintained very well. Is there way for me to create my own backup somewhere of what Anki xiehanzi is doing?
Thank you so much for any help