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.

Field Name	Description
Hanzi	Simplified character (REQUIRED)
Traditional	Traditional form
Definition	Meaning of character
Pinyin	Most common pinyin
Pinyin 2	Other possible pinyin
Words	Example words
Formation	Origin / mnemonic for character
HSK	Hanyu Shuiping Kaoshi level
Audio	Audio file name (required for audio)

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
• Progress bars: tqdm
• HTML parsing and scraping: Beautiful Soup
• Data manipulation: Pandas
• GUI: Tkinter

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