anki – Ancient Latin Deck
by Trevor Turk
This is a guest post from Timothy O’Connell.
A recent LifeHacker article got me interested in anki, a cross-platform Simple Repetition System (SRS) or flash-card app.
anki allows users to create or import modular “decks” of “cards” that they can use to study whatever it is that they want to study. Which is, in and of itself, pretty great: as soon as I learned about this, I got excited. My enthusiasm went on the wane, however, when I discovered that there was no deck for ancient Latin (the casual study of which has long been a hobby of mine).
So I decided to create one by scraping the Latin dictionary at http://classicsunveiled.com/. The details of the scrape and the import of the entries into a Postgres database are relatively uninteresting: there are also hundreds of good tutorial on BeautifulSoup and psycopg2 out there and the world obviously has no use for another one from a self-proclaimed n00b like me.
What the world might find useful, however, is the ancient Latin deck I created. Here’s a step-by-step* on how to get it going:
- Download the .txt file from my personal blog: http://demongin.orghttp://s3.amazonaws.com/almosteffortless/ankiLatin.txt
- Start anki.
- Click “File” -> “Import”
- Click “Choose file…” and browse for ankiLatin.txt.
- Once you’ve selected the file, everything should be ready to go: click “Import” (to the right of the “Field mapping” controls), give the program a second to import the deck, select close and get busy.
* NB: these instructions are based on the Debian package version of anki (i.e. 0.9.9.4).
ah, I've figured it out.
Thanks for the effort!! This will go to good use!
Glad you got it figured out.
I wasted like, a half an hour of my life picking through useless results before I finally gave up and started working on creating the deck and would like to prevent anyone else from suffering similarly. Tell your friends, ping this page back from your WP blog: spread the word and help get this URL closer to the top of the Google results.
As fate would have it, I sat down today to make my own anki deck for Latin in order to review some vocabl… and then it occurred to me to see if someone had already done it for me– and voila! Unfortunately the link you provide doesn’t seem to work. Can you actually import .txt files into anki?
Cheers!
Well, Nicole may have figured it out, but I haven't. The link takes me to a "can't locate the server" page.
??
Joanna,
Here is the correct link, I guess:
http://media.demongin.com/media/files/ankiLatin.t…
Anki is also available on Android, iPhone and a number of other devices.
(disclaimer: I maintain the Android version, surprisingly called… AnkiDroid)
Cheers!
Nicolas Raoul