¬ just serendipity 🍀 (not just serendipity)

This post builds upon the previous Anki: custom language card.

Searching word boundaries #

When searching for a word such as Mann, results such as Mannschaft come up.

To search accounting for the word boundary, like a typical \bMann\b regex, use w:. In this example: w:Mann.

Searching ignoring accents #

When searching for a word with Umlauts such as Über, you should type it exactly as is.

If you are lazy or do not recall where the umlaut falls, perhaps you would think of searching for uber, however that does not work.

To make it work, prepend nc: to the word. In this case: nc:uber will properly match über. NC stands for non-combining.

Searching word boundaries whilst ignoring accents #

Is it possible to combine the two aforementioned operators? For example, to match für. Unfortunately, it is not. Anki does not support w:nc:fur nor nc:w:fur, which is unfortunate. Schade!

In this case the best compromise would be to search for w:für.

Adding images to flashcards #

It is pretty straightforward: Right click the image in your favorite web browser, copy it, and then paste it (Ctrl/Cmd + V) into Anki. The image is automatically imported.

No-brainer image sources:

• dict.cc
• Google Images

Nowadays it would also be natural¹ to use “AI” to generate images.

Providing examples: style #

To illustrate with a concrete example:

1: Ja, genau.

2: Das ist ja komisch.

Affirmative

The structure:

• Bold numbers to disambiguate
• Underscore the word in question to emphasize it
• Italicize everything that is meta or an explanation about the word

To highlight substrings, e.g. Mann in Mannschaft, use underscores².

Tags #

I seldom tag notes because there is no need for categorization, all cards are treated the same way. Tagging is only useful in two scenarios:

• for grouping / retrieval: for example, if you want to make custom study sessions for a specific domain / area (e.g. animals, programming, trips)

• for provenance annotations: to make it easier to remember where a given note came from (e.g. “textbook”, “my german teacher”, “blog”, “podcast”, “work”)

Adding tags creates the burden of managing and standardizing them. You do not want to spend valuable mental effort derailing from your main task.

Sources #

• https://docs.ankiweb.net/searching.html