I think my card and cart for my Nintendo DS SRS solution should be here on Monday or Tuesday, so tonight I decided to get ready. Because SugaHOLIC was interested (or at least seemed so), I decided to make a visual walkthrough of what I’ve done so far.

Anki users: Keep in mind that I am using a Basic template for my Anki deck, not a Heisig or Japanese template, so you might have a little more or less work to do here. YMMV.

  1. Export the cards from Anki. I didn’t know you could do that, so I was looking for an external plug-in or lots and lots of busywork. Thank God, it turns out you can export the cards to a tab-delimited file under File->Export after you open your deck. (I chose the option for ‘cards’, not ‘facts’, because I don’t know what the latter is. :))

    export 2

  2. …and, as you can see, my deck looks like crap when I open it up in Notepad++ (my favorite text editor). All the cards are out of order and there’s HTML junk everywhere. Time for some cleanup.

    export 10

  3. First matter: replace the tabs with ^ characters. The NDSRS import utility supports other characters, but since I don’t use ^ in any of my cards, it’s safe for me. Highlight a tab, hit Ctrl-H*, and replace the tab with ^.

    * Ctrl-R is the default for Notepad++, but I remapped it to Ctrl-H because every other text editor on the planet except for the weird Linux ones uses that keystroke.

    export 11

  4. Then I have to clean up the HTML. Maybe you don’t, but as I mentioned in anotherprevious post, I use <font color=”white”> tags to hide my sentences in my SRS. I want the keyword/concept to be intimately linked to the kanji and NOT the story, so I only reveal the story (by highlighting the text) if I need it. If I can’t produce the kanji from the keyword without the story, I improve the story (if I can) and fail the card. Perhaps I’m too hard on myself, but like I said, I want the concept inseparably linked to the kanji.

    Anyway.

    I highlight the code and replace that with nothing, which deletes all of the instances of that tag. Then I search for ‘<span’ and ‘<font’ throughout the document until I’ve cleaned the file. Now it’s only stories and kanji separated by a ^, dazzit.

    export 12

  5. Of course the file is out of order for some reason, so it’s time to sort it in Excel. Under Excel 2007, it’s under Data, then ‘Sort’ in the ‘Sort & Filter’ section.

    export 3

  6. …and then I open it back up in Notepad++. Voila! A beautifully sorted file. At this point we congratulate ourselves and eat some candy or something. Then it’s back to work.

    export 4

  7. Now it’s time to open up the NDSRS Import tool. The reason we’ve been so meticulous so far is that this is an unforgiving program. It’s not going to do it all for you, so you need to have your ducks (or other assorted wildfowl of your choice) in a row before you try to import. Open this image in another tab or window and I’ll explain the numbers:

    export 7

    1. Click the … and find your nicely formatted text document. You’ll have to pick ‘text’ in the dropdown so it’ll let you find the text file as opposed to Pauker or CSV files. The Find dialog looks like this:

      export 5

    2. Path to Flashcard: Whatever drive your flash card is. I don’t have my card yet, so I’m just exporting it to the C: drive. The end product will be in the c:\ndsrs directory, and I can just copy that to my flash card when I get it.
    3. Find the default.ttf font you downloaded from NDSRS’s web site (right?), which for some reason is called ‘さざなみゴシック’ instead of default’.
    4. There is no #4.
    5. You might want to make the kanji character a little bigger, especially for those 16 and 17-stroke monsters. I made it 43 because it seemed like a good size. Richard Petty would approve, if he studied Japanese. Maybe he does, who knows?
    6. Run that bad boy.

  8. Yay! This dialog box means we’re almost done. Click ‘Yes’ unless you don’t want to.

    export 8

  9. Then you can go find your beautiful .XML-formatted masterpiece. It will be saved to driveletter:\ndsrs and will have an extension of .srs. Marvel and wonder, then go eat more candy, because candy is awesome and you deserve it.

    export 9

That’s all I can do for now. According to the manual (PDF warning), I’m going to stick them on the memory card next, but I don’t have the card yet, so I’ll add part 2 later.

Thanks for reading! Let me know if you have any questions or if you just want to tell me how cool I am for putting all this together. ^-^