Keyboard shortcuts and additional translations: supercharge your Speedanki sessions

Hi All,

The December JLPT test results came in a few months ago, and we got some nice feedback:

I used Speedanki to prep for Dec 2009’s 1-kyuu exam, and thanks to your cards I passed 1-kyuu and got an 87 on the vocab/kanji section.

Thanks and keep up the good work!

Moondust Sparkle

Congrats to Moondust and everyone else who passed! And これからもっと頑張りましょう to those who didn’t ;)

Now for the actual beef of this post. Noah Figg emailed us to tell us that he has developed a script that adds keyboard and mouse shortcuts to Speedanki! This will make it much easier for power users to flip between cards and file them into folders. Thanks a lot Noah!

You can download and install the script here. It is designed for the Firefox browser, which you can download here if you don’t have it yet. Edit: Also works with Google Chrome and may work with other browsers as well.

Instructions from the script’s download page:

Sanki SpeedAnki.com Shortcuts

Adds keyboard shortcuts to Speedanki.com site.
Version: 0.1.2

Adds keyboard and mouse shortcuts to Speedanki.com Japanese vocabulary memorization site.

They are targeted at all views but the list view, i.e. flash card type views.

Keyboard shortcuts use only the arrow keys and shift key. Mouse shortcuts are done by middle-clicking and dragging 60+ pixels in a direction and shift key.

Up/down – flip card
Left – previous card
Right – next card

Shift-Up – move card up one category
Shift-Down – move card down one category
Shift-Left – toggle example sentence
Shift-Right – toggle meaning

Another Firefox add-on that I use myself and have been meaning to write about for a long time is Rikaichan: a Japanese dictionary that translates words and shows kanji readings and radicals when you simply move your mouse pointer over a kanji in Firefox. It’s a useful complement to Speedanki: if you want to check out what other meanings a word may have, or what radicals that kanji contains, just move your mouse pointer over a Speedanki card. It also supports not only English translations, but German, French and Russian as well.

You can download and install Rikaichan here (again, the Firefox browser is required). Tip: when you are hovering over a kanji compound and want to examine an individual kanji, press Shift and Rikaichan will change to a different mode.

The next JLPT exam is little more than a month away. 頑張れ！