AnkiChinese

Asynchronously scrape the ArchChinese dictionary to generate Anki flashcards

Online Flashcard

Offline Flashcard

Installation

pip install ankichinese
playwright install

Usage

ankichinese

-h, --help                          Show help message and exit

--export, -x {anki, csv, update}    Export mode (default: anki)
                                    anki: Generate new AnkiChinese deck
                                    csv: Generate CSV file
                                    update: Update existing deck
--input, -i INPUT                   Input file with characters to scrape (default: input.txt)
--output, -o OUTPUT                 Name of output file (do not include extension)
                                    (default: ankichinese_output)

--definitions, -def NUM             Number of definitions to scrape per character (default: 5)
--examples, -ex NUM                 Number of example words to scrape per character (default: 5)

--requests-at-once, -r NUM          Maximum number of requests at once (default: 10)
--requests-per-second, -rs NUM      Maximum number of requests per second (default: 5)

Generate New AnkiChinese Deck

How to create an entirely new Anki deck with the name ankichinese_output.apkg in the current directory using custom AnkiChinese styling.

1. Create input.txt with the characters you want to scrape.
2. Run ankichinese -x anki.
3. Open Anki and import ankichinese_output.apkg.

Updating is Easy!
Just run ankichinese -x anki again with new characters in input.txt and import the new ankichinese_output.apkg file into Anki. Anki will automatically update the existing deck without losing progress.

Update Existing (Non-AnkiChinese) Deck Without Losing Progress

1. Create input.txt with the characters you want to scrape (can be the same as the existing deck).
2. Run ankichinese -x update.
3. Choose deck and model of cards to update. AnkiChinese will search for and overwrite any fields with the same names as the following.

4. Import the new ankichinese_audio.apkg file into Anki. This will import the audio files (and create an empty deck that can be deleted)

Tools Used

• Asynchronous I/O: Asyncio
• Limit concurrency: Aiometer
• Web automation and HTML interaction: Playwright
• Anki deck generation: Genanki
• Anki database access: AnkiPandas
• HTML parsing and scraping: Beautiful Soup
• Data manipulation: Pandas
• GUI: Gooey

Credits

Character information: ArchChinese

Stroke order diagrams:

• Online stroke order diagrams: Hanzi Writer
• Offline stroke order font: Reinaert Albrecht

Chinese audio:

• Standard tones: Yoyo Chinese
• Neutral tones: Purple Culture