Anki for stenography

Anki is a cross-platform flashcard program that uses spaced repetition. The basic idea is that if the card is easy you will see it less often, and if the card is hard you will see it more often. Anki does not grade you automatically (unless you want it to) — you have full control.

It can be useful for learning many things, and for steno people have used it for memorising briefs and theory rules.

Set up Anki

 * 1) Download and install Anki Anki is available on desktop, mobile and web. However, when you are first setting up your Anki deck you should use the desktop version, since it has the most features. You can sync Anki with AnkiWeb to access your decks across devices.
 * 2)  or use a

Make your own deck
Making your own deck allows you to have greater control over the cards (e.g. the briefs you want to use).

The most basic way is to use the default deck and add cards to it. "Front" and "Back" can be whatever you want, though most people put the translation on the front and the steno stroke on the back.

Custom fields
Instead of just "Front" and "Back", you might want more fields like "Pseudo Steno", "Stroke Diagram", "Notes" etc.


 * 1) Add a new note type so that it won’t interfere with anything else you might use Anki for
 * 2) Customise the fields and or rename the fields to what you want
 * 3) Add the new fields to the card template (see )

Custom cards
The default cards have the "Front" field, and when you answer it shows the "Back" field, as well as a reverse card. If you want to show more fields, you’ll have to customise your card.

See the anki docs here, including the next few pages, for how to do this.

Particular things that are useful for steno are:

Text-to-speech
(Text to Speech in ankidocs)

This will read out the text in the "Front" field, which is useful if you want to practice from dictation. You can also use the AwesomeTTS add-on for more voices.

Field styling
(Field styling in ankidocs)

There are lots of ways you can style your fields, like making the notes smaller or colour coding your fields.

For example, to use Kaoffie’s Steno Font:

Put this in the card:

Put this in the styling:

This uses a font for the steno strokes to make it into a stroke diagram which looks like this:

You may want to install the font into Anki if you can’t install fonts on your computer or if you want a portable Anki deck.

Checking your answer
(Checking your answer in ankidocs)

Write your answer and when you turn the card over it will color code any differences. You could choose to check against the translation field, or turn off your dictionaries and check against the strokes.

You might want a separate field for checking, since you may want prefix/suffix cards like "{^ing}" but what you type out is actually "ing".

It is also possible to hide the text you are typing by adding the following to your styling. This might be useful if you want to focus on trusting your muscle memory.

Pre-made decks
You can use a deck someone else has made. Download the  file, and import with File in the Anki menu then Import.


 * rchern/steno-anki
 * Learn Plover! lessons
 * Top 10K Words
 * Emily’s Symbols and Modifiers dictionaries
 * Other community-contributed shared decks
 * Script to generate cards from text file
 * jladdjr/anki-decks
 * Top 10,000 Project Gutenberg words
 * Basic sounds
 * Steno order and Phonetic strokes
 * A small deck with cards on steno order and phonetic strokes
 * percidae/Anki_Plover
 * Complete plover dictionary

Useful Anki add-ons
Anki Add-ons are third party extensions that add features to anki. To install them, click Tools in the Anki menu, then Add-ons then Get Add-ons.


 * Automatic Scoring
 * Automatically selects the difficulty of the card based on how long it took to answer it
 * You still have to press "enter" to confirm, so you still have full control
 * You may want to adjust the default time to something different. You can show the answer timer and look at your answer button graph to get an idea of what a reasonable time might be
 * Pairs well with Advanced Review Bottom Bar which makes it easier to see which button has been pre-selected
 * Anki Connect
 * Needed for some
 * Find Missing Words
 * Paste in a block of text and this will help you find words you don’t have cards for
 * Anki Simulator
 * Simulates your reviews over time. Useful for choosing settings (e.g. number of new cards a day) that won’t overwhelm you. (You can see how long you take per card that day in the Stats window or below the list of decks, and use this to see how many repetitions you want)
 * Keeps the editing window open while reviewing (but hides the current card until you’ve answered it). Useful if you are using a pre-made deck and prefer different briefs to the ones that are there
 * Mini Format Pack
 * Gives you more formatting options in the menu. Useful for making lists of alternative strokes, or other formatting
 * AwesomeTTS
 * Gives you access to a range of TTS voices and human recorded voices (Forvo)
 * Copy selection field
 * Lets you copy several selected entries in the Anki browse window, for example to copy into a practice tool like Steno Jig or Typey Type

Useful Plover extensions

 * Plover Cards
 * See previously typed words/phrases, sorted by various properties (e.g. last used, most used), choose your preferred stroke and add them into Anki
 * Command to quickly bring up the last X words you typed and their suggestions in an Anki Add Card window
 * Requires Anki Connect
 * Spectra Lexer
 * Analyzes strokes and generates stroke diagrams which explains the stroke. You can save these diagrams for use in Anki by clicking Save in the bottom left of the diagram