List memorization made easy!
This is an add-on for the spaced-repetition flashcard app Anki. It facilitates memorizing enumerations, lists, or any other type of sequential information by breaking the sequence up into cards where each item serves as the context cue for the next.
Memorizing lists and enumerations has always been a particularly difficult part of studying flashcards. Good flashcards follow the minimum information principle, where each card is kept as short as possible. Sequential information has unfortunately always somewhat eluded that basic principle because it is hard to break down into smaller chunks. Normally you would employ methods like grouping or categorizing to consolidate information, but with each item building upon the next, that does usually not work for sequences or enumerations.
One of the common recommendations in cases like this has always been to create overlapping flashcards, where each card's answer serves as the question prompt for next card in line. For an array of three list items A, B, C you would end up with three cards of the form A → B, B → C, and C → D. What results is chain of overlapping associations between each sequence node that can potentially improve the storage and retrieval strength of the entire sequence.
While this method is generally assumed to be quite effective, following it requires a significant time investment up-front that only few students are able or willing to make.
This is where Cloze Overlapper comes in. It takes care of all the arduous steps required to create these flashcards manually and provides you with a dead-simple workflow: You paste in the sequence or list, adjust the cloze generation settings, and let the add-on generate the cards for you.
More generally speaking, Cloze Overlaper provides Anki with a completely novel cloze system that can cover almost every use case you can think of, be it revealing each taxon of a classification system individually, or even gradually building up to an entire poem:
Due to working with the formatting tools that Anki provides itself, the cards generated by this add-on are fully compatible with all Anki platforms, smartphone apps included:
The easiest way to install Cloze Overlapper is through AnkiWeb.
Please click on the entry corresponding to your Anki version:
Note: Pre-compiled test builds for Anki 2.1 are now available on my Patreon. These will become public once testing is complete.
Anki 2.1
- Make sure you have the latest version of Anki 2.1 installed. Earlier releases (e.g. found in various Linux distros) do not support
.ankiaddonpackages. - Download the latest
.ankiaddonpackage from my Patreon - From Anki's main window, head to Tools → Add-ons
- Drag-and-drop the
.ankiaddonpackage onto the add-ons list - Restart Anki
Anki 2.0
- Go to Tools → Add-ons → Open add-ons folder
- Find and delete the
Cloze Overlapper.pyfile if it already exists. - See if you can find a
cloze_overlapperfolder. If so:- If the folder contains a
meta.jsonfile, copy the file to a safe location. This will allow you to preserve your current settings. - Proceed to delete the
cloze_overlapperfolder
- If the folder contains a
- Download and extract the latest Anki 2.0 add-on release from my Patreon
- Move the extracted
Cloze Overlapper.pyandcloze_overlapperinto the add-ons folder - Optional: Place the
meta.jsonfile back into the directory if you created a copy beforehand. - Restart Anki
The use of the add-on is documented in the Wiki section and a series of video tutorials on YouTube. More information may also be found in the AnkiWeb description.
With Anki add-on builder installed:
git clone https://github.com/glutanimate/cloze-overlapper.git
cd cloze-overlapper
aab build
For more information on the build process please refer to aab's documentation.
Contributions are welcome! Please review the contribution guidelines on how to:
- Report issues
- File pull requests
- Support the project as a non-developer
Cloze Overlapper is Copyright © 2019 Aristotelis P. (Glutanimate)
With code contributions from: zjosua, (Thank you!)
I would like to extend my heartfelt thanks to everyone who has helped with testing, provided suggestions, or contributed in any other way!
I'd also like to thank:
- Piotr Wozniak for laying the theoretical groundwork for overlapping cloze deletions with his 20 rules of formulating knowledge
- Soren Bjornstad for giving me the inspiration for this add-on with his project AnkiLPCG, back when it was still a standalone module
Cloze Overlapper is free and open-source software. The add-on code that runs within Anki is released under the GNU AGPLv3 license, extended by a number of additional terms. For more information please see the LICENSE file that accompanied this program.
This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY.
