Anki Cards for Korean

My go-to method for helping me memorise things consistenly over the years has been by spaced repetition. The software that I used for this has always been Anki – it is a free and open source flashcard program using spaced repetition and a scheduling algorithm to optimise knowledge retention.

However, in the years that I’ve used Anki, I’ve never gone as far to actually make my own flashcards. There is a big community using Anki, meaning there are already many decks available on a wide variety of topics, which have been made by the community. There are a lot of people who use it to memorise things during their medical studies, but it’s also a popular for learning new languages. I’ve previously used it to learn

• the names of a hundred different colours in English;
• world geography, including flags, capitals and location of all sovereign states; and
• the vocabulary of a foreign language, notably memorising the most frequently used kanji in Japanese.

Memorising something with spaced repetition, especially with Anki, is something that is best done on a daily basis. If you fail to keep up with the scheduled cards to review on a day, they will continue to add up to a huge pile – something that will continue to corrode away at the motivation to keep up reviewing cards.

Learning Korean

Since I’ve come to be in Seoul for a significant time now, it really has become non-negotionable to get a decent grasp on the Korean language. There’s a ton of resources out there on how to learn Korean – many books and websites have been written trying to guide you to fluency.

One thing they all agree on: it is essential to first learn reading hangul (한글), the phonetic alphabet specifically designed to write the Korean language. Here, phonetic means that pronounciation of Korean words comes with knowing how to read them. I’ve found Design Lessons from the Korean Alphabet to be a really interesting read on what makes the design of hangul good, and I recommend you to read it if you’re interested in learning the Korean language, or just in design in general.

In the past, characters borrowed from Chinese were primarily used to write Korean – characters referred to as hanja (한자). However, due to differences between the Chinese and Korean language it was hard for the general population to learn to read these characters. Thus in order to promote literacy amongst his people, Korea’s king created and promoted the use of a new, simpler alphabet for the Korean language. Nowadays hanja are a rare sight in Korean writing, and have largely been replaced with hangul.

Korean vocabulary through Anki.

Exposing yourself to the language really is a key part of the language learning process. Thus, when learning the new cards set by the spaced repetition program, it’s really valuable to have visual and auditory feedback. I think this is part of the reason why the Japanese kanji deck was so succesful for me: between each kanji it helped create visual links by having a related picture, auditory links by having playing the pronounciation. Furthermore, an example sentence in which the word was used helps to understand its role for the learner’s current mess, and navigate the jungle of grammatical constructions.

I’m sure you’ll understand my dissapointment when I couldn’t find a readily available high quality Anki deck for learning myself Korean vocabulary everyday. I wasn’t able to fully expose and gain understanding of Korean; thus I couldn’t make full use of the immersion in Korean language that was given by being here in Seoul.

That’s sad – a missed opportunity.

Making Anki Cards.

There are two ways for us to create Anki cards. The first is manually, through the Anki GUI. This is fairly tedious, especially if we want to create hundreds or even thousands of cards at once. Luckily for us, the second way is more automisable by using a script. Anki is partly built with Python, so we can use the built-in Python methods to create a script which will then create for us the cards we want.

The article Anki Scripting: Automate your flashcards helped me a fair bit here, and it is a great reference to understand how Anki and its data structures work. Unfortunately the Anki source code has been updated by now, and the methods and scripts suggested for making Anki cards are not fully compatible anymore.

A good thing to know for my own reference is that, by default on macOS, Anki stores its files in

~/Library/Application\ Support/Anki2/User/

where User is the name of the user given on first startup. In this location, the file collection.anki2 contains the database containing all decks and cards, and the folder collection.media is used to store media which you is used by your cards, i.e. images or sound files. From here I will be using a fresh user, so that this post can serve for future reference.