Anki 2.0, Esperanto, and GitHub
Tue, Apr 24, 2012
Recently, I had become aware that Anki 2.0 was in beta through my friend Tom, who is working on making some changes to the MCD Support plugin so that it supports languages like Spanish as well as it does Japanese. Despite this awareness, it never crossed my mind that I might need to update the Esperanto Support addon that I wrote a couple years ago until I received an email from Damien Elmes, the author of Anki, that it was time to look at doing so.
Esperanto Support Plugin for Anki
Thu, Aug 5, 2010
So I decided to learn Esperanto, which as an avid user of the SRS application Anki, meant I needed to either enter Esperanto’s special characters (ĉ, ĝ, ĥ, ĵ, ŝ, ŭ) into my flash cards, which can’t easily be typed with the US International keyboard layout, or I could deal with the ugly “x method” workaround (cx, gx, hx, jx, sx, ux). At first, I was only creating Esperanto cards from my Linux computers at home, which let me use an Esperanto keyboard layout to type in the special characters. Pretty soon though, I found myself creating cards from my Windows machine at work during breaks. There is no Esperanto keyboard layout in Windows by default, so I tried to install some third party keyboard layouts without success. I eventually came across a program called Ek, which seemed to do the job of letting me type special characters, except in Anki where it would only type “ĉ”. So I just dealt with the “x method” and was typing words like vojagxas instead of vojaĝas. I don’t know why, but after a while all the x’s began to really bother me. I didn’t want to see mangxi in my flash cards, it just doesn’t seem as natural as manĝi does. So I did what any other software developer would do….