We can use various materials and tools available on the internet to continue our study of Japanese. Over time, we will select the materials and tools that bring us the best results.
Since many times we can use materials available on the internet or we can try to organize what we find online and create our own material, in general, we can mention Anki, a well-known program for language study.
Anki is constantly mentioned and used in the Online Japanese Program, the jisho that has been mentioned on Sukidesu, the news web easy site for reading, among others, the use of PDFs in studies is also very relevant.
The Problem of Using Anki
Many times, repetitive and time-consuming tasks, which generally take up our time and thus make us less productive, such as creating material or even making Anki cards – since these cards must be created based on the material we study or even create – often become tedious.
We can also mention the fact that we take a text and go word by word or even take expressions and go to a translator, like Google Translate, or even search on Jisho and then go through Google Translate to get the result, and then create a PDF and add some words to Anki; this takes a lot of time and will be repeated countless times. I’m not saying this is irrelevant; on the contrary, it is very important, as we will be in contact with the language.
Now let’s look at the news web easy site, which has several articles that are constantly updated (mentioned here on Sukidesu), and we want to turn the content there into study material.
Let’s outline a path: select the article, read it (several times), but we want to turn it into study material. We can copy the content, open a text editor of our choice and paste it there. Then we can go to Jisho and research word by word; for each word, we go to Google Translate to translate it into our language, and then add it to our editor. After doing this several times, we can then save it in an editable format and in PDF format. To review, we can add this content to Anki.
In the previous process, we see that this can take some time. Now imagine making this more automatic. How? By using the NWE program.
Using NWE as a Solution
The NWE is a multiplatform desktop program still in development, based on Python. It is exclusive to follow the previous process, meaning it only works for the news web easy site.
It will take an article, then it will research word by word on Jisho and then it will translate using Google Translate and turn this into a PDF and generate cards for Anki.
The nwe (news wen easy) is software developed by narutolavo. For more information, the code is available on github, pypi, and libraries.
To use NWE, we need to have Python version 3 or higher installed; in my case, it is version 3.8.5.
If Python is not installed (as it comes pre-installed in some operating systems), we can follow the steps below according to your operating system:
In the Windows tutorial, the executable can be downloaded; in the MacOS tutorial, it can be done through the terminal; in the Linux tutorial, it can also be done through the terminal depending on the distribution.
Right after the previous step, we need to have pip installed in Python. In the terminal or command prompt, run the command pip3 install nwe. After it is executed, we can type nwe in the terminal/command prompt to see the program’s initial screen. The following images illustrate this better.
We take a URL from an article on the news web easy site, paste it into the insert link field, and press the start button. We wait for the progress bar to complete; this is the most time-consuming part because the program will access the article, download the content, research on Jisho, and then on Google Translate. Once completed, we can then click on generate PDF and create Anki, which are the fastest parts of the process.
We can go to Anki and click on import card and look for the file anki.txt and just click OK; we already have the PDF and the Anki deck. The images below illustrate this better:
Leave a Reply