Made some New Practical Chinese Reader Anki Cards

If you don’t want to pay 30usd to get Pleco paid features which has the flashcards ankidroid should help.  So for those classmates on a budget here is a way to hack at your learning.

Here is Ankidroid app. this will run the flashcards. it works through spaced repetition 

How to Install to App .

  1. Turn on the Ankidroid app on your phone. 
  2. Download the New Practical Chinese Reader Apkg file 
    1. as soon as it is downloaded Ankidroid will detect it and promp
  3. Open Anki Droid App. 
  4. Done. 
Here is the NPCR chapters. 

You may want to create custom decks to study particular chapters. The larger the deck the more cards, so you may want to have smaller decks that repeat words of a challenging chapter. 

How to create a Deck from the NPCR flashcards.  

  1. Get the NPCR flashcards from Pleco. you will find here in a previous post
  2. Open is using XLS or Google Sheets or Libreoffice Calc. 
  3. Use the following Functions to Sort it.
    1. Anki droid reads a TXT file by the spaces. So 3 elements per line is for Front, Back, and Tags. 
    2. use the & function to combine cells. 
      1. ex. =(b3)&(“<b />)&(c3)… (repeating the pattern) to combine texts from other cells into one cell. I ended up merging cells from b column to i column. 
      2. this ends up looking like “b3 contents”<b /> “c3 contents” <b /> “d3 contents”…
      3. this is important because you need <b /> to break the second set of text which goes on the back of the virtual card into spaces that go down. The Ankidroid app detects spaces and assigns a position on the card based on the spaces. 
      4. When you import click the “Allow HTML fields” (needs to be active). 
    3. select the cell with  the formula and drag  down to paste its contents to other cells. There are about 2500+ lines words so dont be greedy and pace yourself. After figuring it out (45mins) it took me about 20 minutes. 
    4. Now paste into Notepad! Because you cannot just cut and paste it into a new sheet. 
      1. cut&paste into a new sheet just copies the function. 
    5. From the notepad paste it back into a New Clean Sheet. 
      1. It should only occupy 2 columns. 
    6. I copied the Chapters as the third slot as a Tag. It shows up as 1-8 in the tags. (need to make it show up NPCR 1 to 8. (220 words)
      1. if you want to have multiple tags in the third cell seperate them with <b />. 
    7. make sure it saves as UTF-8 in the encoding settings. Name it the chapters you’ve copied (just have  good naming conventin).   
  4. Opening the Anki Droid in Windows 8. 
    1. Create a New Deck. 
    2. Open Deck
    3. Go to File > Import.  
    4. Imported the NPCR 1-8 txt file i have. 
    5. Click on browse to check it.
    6. Check to see if the cards work. 
    7. if it does Export to an Apkg file.  
  5. Open the Deck and choose Custom Study to make smaller decks. 
  6. Export these decks and name them. 
I will work on the decks a little at a time. My brain is fried. 

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