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!

  1. Alex Yau’s avatar

    Finally! This was the main reason why I switched to Anki. The script seems to work fine in Google Chrome.

  2. Vili’s avatar

    Alex, thanks for the tip, I edited the post.

    If anyone tries this with other browsers, feel free to leave a note here and let us know how it worked.

  3. jamie Macg’s avatar

    I:ll try it tonight when \i get home. this is a great improvement though and one of the big things this site lacked!!!

    oh btw I bought the N2 practise exam, 1400円 and only ONE f**king test!!!! can you believe it? I plan to scan in it and make a torrents or something, no one should have to pay that for only one paper.

    the rest of the book just explains the new format in like 200 languages

  4. Jamie MacGregor’s avatar

    yo just to let you know!

    Everythings working fine on firefox! Happy times !!!

  5. Paul’s avatar

    First of all, thanks for this neat and really helpful website! Im planning
    on studying my kanji here for N3.

    I just got a little question here, is there a way for me to change the
    font style in the cards to the usual font style we see everyday? Sorry,
    I dont know the “usual” font style but I think you kinda get it; the cards’
    font are a little bit different=)

  6. Prem’s avatar

    Noah San, you are the man . tons of thanks for this gr8 work . Works perfectly with chrome .

  7. Humphrey’s avatar

    Firstly I want to say that I love your site…It is user friendly, intuitive and extremely effective. You have helped me so much with my studies, so thank you so much…

    I appreciate this is a bit off topic but I want to know if you’re planning on making an iphone application. There are some already out there but none of them are as a good as speedanki. I know that I for one would be prepared to pay hard cash to use this…

  8. Humphrey’s avatar

    Stumbling back on topic, having downloaded the shortcuts script, it is a fantastic addition to the site.

    Thank you Noah, very grateful!

  9. hgfjut’s avatar

    N5-82 have the example phrase switched.

  10. James’s avatar

    Hey there,

    I see that there has not been any activity on your blog for sometime, but I was just wondering if you will be adding the N3 section to Speedanki any time soon? I have found your site super helpful in my kanji work, but I need to review the N3 Kanji a bit before proceeding to N2.

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