DISCLAIMER: I had a few issues with trying to import more than once into one Anki profile from JPDB. I strongly recommend backing your profile up AND what I did for another level of protection was hit the button in the syncing settings so that it did a one way sync on next sync so that I could restore from AnkiWeb easily in case I messed up

DISCLAIMER 2: Not all of these steps work on the newest Anki version as of the time of this writing. I did it on 2.1.65

Importing the cards

Before you start - if you ever abandoned cards, open your JPDB review history in Notepad++ or something and switch abandoned to nothing or something. (I removed any abandoned reviews on the end of their list, but that's a little trickier)

First off this is what you use to import the review history: https://ankiweb.net/shared/info/541896873

There are 3 major problems once you get the cards ported over from JPDB:

  1. There are a ton of useless cards
  2. There are no definitions
  3. There's no sound

Problem 1: Tons of Useless Words

The basic idea I had here was to:

  1. Import one of the BIG core decks (the one I found was like 20k notes)
  2. Import JPDB cards into the core deck note
  3. Use "Find Duplicates" to match JPDB cards to their filled out core deck cards
  4. Tag the duplicates, then merge the JPDB and Core cards that were dupes
  5. I used the tag to split these (now filled out) JPDB cards into a JPDB (Core) deck and JPDB (Other) deck
  6. Now I deleted the core deck, and changed note type for the JPDB cards to whatever note I actually wanted

There will still be useful cards in the "Other" deck - haven't figured out a good comprehensive way to keep what is useful and what isn't but this cuts out most of the crap at least. Also gives you some sentences for the cards it matched

The extension I used to merge:

Problem 2: No Definitions

If your core deck has decent definitions you might not need this step for those, but I wanted to backfill with my yomichan definitions and also the "Other" cards will be totally blank. There isn't an extension I know of dedicated to this job, but migaku can do this. Migaku is not free of course, but it was totally worth it to me for this as an easy button. Migaku lets you use basically whatever Yomichan dictionary you want which is super nice.

I was using this great note: https://aquafina-water-bottle.github.io/jp-mining-note/ and was able to import the main definition I wanted into the primary definition field and the secondary/extras into the respective fields as well. Worked really well. In theory migaku can backfill sound too but this did not work well for me, so I gave up on it

If not using the migaku note I strongly recommend removing the language syntax it dumps into the definitions once you are done

I used:

If anyone knows an alternative I would love to know

Problem 3: No word sound

Backfilling audio was a bit of a pain to figure out. What finally got it to work at all for me was a combination of

https://github.com/themoeway/local-audio-yomichan
and
https://ankiweb.net/shared/info/1156270186

which got the job done. To give an idea of how slow this still was for me though even using the local server: it was about 1500-2000 audios an hour. I just let it run overnight

Just make sure to actually change the field names in the batch audio thing to match your card field names - that tripped me up since I didn't notice that I had to change it at first

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Pub: 10 Nov 2023 00:42 UTC
Views: 366