Anki Lyrics/Poetry Cloze Generator (LPCG) is a Python script to ease the creation of Anki cards for memorizing a long passage of text verbatim, such as poetry or song lyrics.
For more information on Anki, see http://ankisrs.net.
Copyright (c) 2013-2014 Soren Bjornstad.
Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.3 or any later version published by the Free Software Foundation; with no Invariant Sections, no Front-Cover Texts, and no Back-Cover Texts. A copy of the license can be found in the COPYING file or at http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html.
If you have any questions which are not answered by this manual, you may either email me at anki@sorenbjornstad.com or post on the Anki help forum (http://anki.tenderapp.com). I read the forum daily, as I am employed answering support questions for Anki proper there.
If you have found a bug or wish to suggest an improvement, you may post on the issue tracker or submit a pull request at GitHub: https://github.com/sobjornstad/AnkiLPCG.
It is extremely difficult and very bad form to put an entire poem into Anki and try to memorize it as a single card. What people often want to do is define an order of the cards, so that Anki asks them for the lines in order. At first glance this seems to make sense: when you want to recite a poem or sing a song, you go through it in order, right? But spaced repetition and Anki work well only when the cards are placed in random order. Therefore, the trick is to provide enough context that you can figure out what point in the text you are at on every card.
I have found that two lines of context is enough to allow me to recall the third line without being excessively long. When studying, I sing through the first two lines of the lyrics, then try to answer the third. My goal is to go for fluency so I don't have to stop and think, like I would if I were singing it.
You probably won't be able to recite a poem or sing a song completely fluently after studying this way. However, you should know the text quite well, and if you run through it a couple of times and correct yourself on any weak points, you probably will be able to do it the next time. And better yet, you will continue to remember it on at least this level even if you never see or hear of the song or poem outside of Anki for 25 years, enough that even if you've lost your fluency you'll be able to pick it up again quickly.
LPCG allows you to easily generate overlapping cloze deletion cards with two lines of context for the entire text of a song or poem. Read on to find out how.
LPCG accepts simple text files as input. Each line of the song/poem should be on a separate physical line of the text file, just as you would normally write it. For instance:
Tyger! Tyger! burning bright
In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?
You should not use blank lines between stanzas, as this will cause a nasty blank line to appear in your Anki cards (the cloze will contain nothing). Instead, I like to put an (E) at the end of the final line of a stanza. This way, the generated card will look something like this:
What immortal hand or eye
Could frame thy fearful symmetry? (E)
[...]
This allows you to know that the next line is the start of the next stanza while still looking good and not producing useless cards.
I haven't run into any encoding issues myself; I've saved my files in ASCII or UTF-8. As a test, I tried putting some Japanese characters in a text file and LPCG processed it correctly, so I think it should deal with any Unicode characters properly. Please let me know if something doesn't work.
If you're using TextEdit on a Mac to generate the text file, you should be aware that TextEdit saves in RTF (Rich Text Format) mode rather than plain text mode by default. RTF files will import successfully into Anki, but there will be a bunch of garbage on the cards. You can use the menu option Format -> Make Plain Text to change to a plain text file.
In order to use LPCG, you first need to add the LPCG note type to your collection. LPCG ships with a file called "lpcg_note_type.apkg," which contains one card of the LPCG note type. You can import this into Anki by double-clicking on it; if it succeeds, one dummy card will be added to your Default deck. After the import is successful, you may safely delete this test card and the note type will remain.
Mac OS X and nearly all Linux distributions come with Python preinstalled. You need Python version 2.7.x to run LPCG; 3.0 does not work.
On Windows, you can check if you have Python by attempting to start LPCG by double-clicking on it. If Windows tells you it doesn't recognize the file type, you need to install Python. You can download Python from http://python.org/download/releases/2.7.8/. If you know you have a 64-bit operating system, download the Windows X86-64 MSI installer; otherwise, download the Windows x86 MSI installer. Installation is straightforward and works just like installing any other program.
On Linux and Mac OS X, you may need to set the script as executable. (You'll know this if you attempt to run it and nothing happens or a text editor opens instead.) You can either do this through your file browser (details depend on your computer), or universally by opening a terminal (Applications -> Utilities -> Terminal on a Mac), typing sudo chmod 755, then a space, then dragging and dropping the script onto the terminal window, and finally pressing Enter.
LPCG assumes that your Anki executable is stored in one of these locations:
- 'C:\Program Files\Anki\anki.exe' (or Program Files (x86)) on Windows
- '/Applications/Anki.app/Contents/MacOS/Anki' on Mac OS X
- 'anki' (on the system path) on Linux
If it isn't, you'll receive a warning when you start LPCG telling you to define a custom Anki location. You don't have to do this, but if you don't you'll have to manually import a temporary file in an awkward location every time you generate cards. Here's how to fix it:
- Find a shortcut to Anki, open up the Properties for it, and determine the full path to the target. The specifics depend on your operating system. The path should be fairly long and contain slashes (/) or backslashes (\).
- Open the lpcg.py file in a text editor such as Notepad or TextEdit. You can either start the text editor first and use File -> Open to open the file or try right-clicking on the file and looking for an option such as "Edit" or "Open With."
- Go to roughly line 25, inside the box made of hashes. You will see a line that looks like custom_anki_location = ''. Type or paste the path you got in step 1 between the single quotation marks.
- If your path contains backslashes, \, usually only if you're using Windows, change every backslash to two backslashes in a row (\\).
- Save the file and restart LPCG. The warning message should be gone now.
If you believe that you installed Anki in a standard location and LPCG should search that location by default, please contact me (see the Support section) and provide the path and I will add it.
On Windows, double-click on the file. On Linux and Mac OS X, open a terminal, change to the directory you have LPCG stored in, and run './lpcg.py'. If you're using OS X and are not familiar with the terminal, you can change the directory by command-dragging the folder you want to switch to out of Finder onto a terminal window. On Mac OS X, depending on your settings, you may or may not be able to double-click instead of using the terminal. The terminal method should always work.
When you run LPCG, you will be shown a copyright notice and a brief help screen. Here's what information you need to give it:
- Input File. Use your file manager (e.g., Windows Explorer, Finder) to locate a previously created file of lyrics or poetry formatted for LPCG (see the section Generating Input Files). Drag and drop the file onto the LPCG terminal window; the path to the file should appear. Press Enter.
- Title. Enter the title of the song or poem here and press Enter. The title will be used to provide context when you're asked for the first line of the song or poem (otherwise, the question for the first line of a text would be indistinguishable from any others you studied).
- Tags. If you want to add tags to all of the cards you're about to import, type them and press Enter. (Remember that tags are separated by spaces in Anki and cannot themselves contain spaces.) I like to add the title separated by underscores or in CamelCase (e.g., "the_tyger" or "TheTyger") so that I can easily search for all the cards of a given song later on.
After entering this information, LPCG will generate the cards, write them to a temporary file, and pull up Anki's import screen. Proceed to the next section.
After running LPCG, Anki should come up and display the Import dialog. Going from top to bottom:
- Type: Set the note type to LPCG.
- Deck: Set the deck to whatever deck you'd like to place the new cards in.
- Fields separated by: Tab should be selected automatically, but if it's not, do so.
- Duplicate handling: As long as you are pretty sure that no other song has the same two lines anywhere in the song (which is probably unlikely), select Update existing notes when first field matches.
- Allow HTML in fields: Make sure this is selected or the line breaks will not import correctly.
- Field mapping: Field 1 should be mapped to Context and field 2 to Line.
After checking that the settings are correct, click the Import button to the right of the field mapping settings (not the Close button in the lower-right). Anki should display "Importing complete" and a count of the number of cards that were generated.
Unfortunately, it is not too easy to update cards, as the context is set as a unique field by Anki and will add duplicate cards when you reimport. Your best bet is to go ahead and run LPCG again, import into Anki using the "update" option, and then delete the old cards. In the future I may look into using a unique ID field to avoid this problem.
Studying LPCG cards works just like studying normal cloze cards in Anki. (The underlying mechanism is different; it does not use the actual cloze deletion function, but unless you go into the template it looks the same.)
While studying, I find it helpful to say or sing the context out loud before attempting to answer; this also helps you practice as if you were actually doing it.
After studying for a week or two, try singing the song or reciting the poem: you'll probably know it fairly well. If you would like to practice fluency, you can copy and paste larger chunks such as whole stanzas into new Anki cards manually, or even add a card that asks you to try saying/singing the whole thing.