[mfringel]

I tried using Anki, but creating/formatting index cards was a total pain (especially for Mandarin), and I didn't feel like doing a graphic design project for every character I wanted to learn.

If there was an easier way to auto-generate flash cards, I could see Anki being more interesting.

[krrrh]

Gabriel Wyner has some good strategies for speeding up flash card generation in his Fluent Forever book and website. The primary one for me being a simple AppleScript that took a word and opened up several safari tabs with google image search, pronunciation (forvo.com), a few online dictionairies, etc. You could take the scripting further, but manually picking the best image to represent an idea adds a lot. Another big help was a script for Anki that bulk-generated text-to-speech for words (which for German was incredibly reliable using Apple's built-in voice fonts). Adding an audio component to vocabulary cards gives another pathway for memory to become established.

The unfortunate truth is that the mental connections that come from building your own deck is a good portion of the benefit that comes from using Anki.