[T-982] Anki2SM doesn't eat dictionary frequency stars

Hey Rine,

You were right, it was the stars.

This morning after doing some chores and doing my reps, I thought I ought to test my Anki2SM workflow. The idea, of course, is that you don’t want Anki’s antiquated SM-2 algo setting your repetition schedule… a young tenderfoot Woz invented this primitive algorithm before he could even run barefoot over broken glass.

We need the all-powerful SM-17 powering or vocab gains! 8-)

So Anki is just there as a sentence picker that has to surrender all its finds to SM. Hand them over!

So my first issue to solve for the day was how to sync my Anki cards between my Mac OS and the VM where SM lives. Oooh, what a challenge, right?

At first I thought I’d need to sync over git.

You spared me from my own terrible idea by reminding me of the most obvious fact that I can just sync over Anki (duh!?).

This was the first time you saved my day today.

I used Anki on and off for many years before I became a Supermemonite. But I got used to SM by now so much, that I forgot that a SRS exists out there that seamlessly syncs between devices.

With the sync problem solved, I thought that my Anki2SM test would be a one-hour task.

Of course it wasn’t… it took a lot more fussing, trying out different versions, different import options… having the images from the cards vanish somewhere between Anki and SM even though Anki2SM recognized all the files…

I was about to give up for today when you discovered that the bug was caused by the stupid star symbols from the dictionary definitions that connote how common/rare a given word is.

This was the second time you saved my day.

In the end, I couldn’t find a way to delete the stars from the cards automatically. So I went with your advice and manually deleted them, card by card.

Anyway, importing sentence cards made in Anki into SM was the final link in my active immersion setup. Now I have my three pillars set-up, the three habits, the three engines to propel me toward fluency!

Habits (to be) unlocked

  1. Daily SRS (firmly rooted with 2+ years daily SM usage)
  2. Passive listening (10+ days… today I skipped, and I felt exposed without my earbud, the way you feel weird if you forget to put your wristwatch in the morning)
  3. Active immersion/Sentence mining (configured setup, only thing is to keep doing it)

I hope with at least two weeks of practicing #3 I will finally finish my launch into this journey and reach escape velocity, and a steady cruising speed toward Japanese competence at T-0.

From then on, my goal will become to integrate this practice into my day-to-day so that it becomes an automatic, thoughtless, invisible thing I do. In other words, sentence mining should become as automatic as nose picking.

The thing to avoid is any further attempts at being too progressive with my setup. I shall only introduce gradual tweaks to the system, to avoid succumbing to the temptation of spending more time fussing with the system than actually exploiting it.

Let us see how it goes.

Obstacles