Hi Abdo! Where do you live ? Anything you want to share about your life ?

I'm a software developer from Syria. I used to live in Turkey as a refugee for over a decade until very recently.

What do you use Anki for, and when did it start ?

I started using Anki for English learning around 2017. If I remember correctly, I first read about it on https://universeofmemory.com.

I only used it briefly back then until I came back to use it regularly a year later. I used to also use Memrise and I guess I found it more addictive.

In addition to English, I mostly use Anki to learn Turkish, Japanese, and some programming.

I consider myself a fairly curious person and I have interest in learning about a lot of other subjects like math and sciences, but I didn't succeed in using Anki for that effectively yet, especially since most of that knowledge is not relevant in my life.

Can we see your Anki setup ?

Here's Anki's main screen showing my deck list. Now and then, I decide my usage of Anki is getting boring and ineffective, so I re-organize my deck structure and note types to reduce clutter and irrelevant cards.

Depending on my level in a given language, I design my own simple note types and try to use create own my cards as much as possible. I focus mostly on creating sentence reading/listening cards using my own sentences or sentences “mined” from media I consume (articles, YouTube videos, etc).

When learning a new language, my main goal is to learn a lot of vocabulary, so I'm able to read basic monolingual dictionaries and music lyrics, start sentence mining, and learning in context.

Here's a view of some of my Anki stats. Consistency is key when it comes to Anki, but I don't particularly care about maintaining my streak. I sometimes skip reviews for a day or when I don't feel like finishing all my reviews (have been happening more often in the last 2 years).

This is my add-on list. Most are developed by me. I don’t use any add-on to change Anki’s UI, but I feel like I should explore gamification add-ons to make my reviews more enjoyable.

Your strong beliefs about Anki

I don't really have any strong beliefs about Anki (And I avoid heated forum discussions), but if I have to mention one thing, it would be the common advice: Anki is a just a tool in your learning arsenal.

I'm guilty sometimes of neglecting other forms of learning and relying too much on drilling Anki cards, especially as a nerd who doesn't like to go outside :)

People using Anki around you

I talked to some friends about Anki, and they tried it for a couple of days, but no one was interested enough in making it a habit.

This is probably not a problem in Anki. Probably all people wish they can understand a foreign language, but few are serious about dedicating the time for it.

Nevertheless, I feel Anki can be appealing to more people with onboarding and UI improvements, which are already being worked on by some people.

I also know you're pretty involved with Anki development, how did you start ?

I started contributing to Anki in 2020. This was my first PR: https://github.com/ankitects/anki/pull/621

Years 2020-2021 were the peak of my Anki enthusiasm. I became one of the most active forum users and started sending fixes for small issues reported by users.

At the same time, I was involved with localizing most of Anki/AnkiMobile/AnkiDroid to Arabic and completed translations of the Anki manual and other docs in a few months.

I also spent a lot of time developing and publishing add-ons (mostly for personal use). I have ~80 Anki-related project on GitHub at the moment.

In 2022, with increasingly more time dedicated to Anki, I saw an opportunity to monetize this hobby and started offering add-on development services on platforms such as Fiverr and Upwork. Most paid add-ons I worked on were released on my GitHub/AnkiWeb.

At the end of the year, I became a member of the AnKing team and started working on maintaining their add-ons. In years 2023-2024, I also joined the AnkiHub team.

At the end of 2024, I was granted merge permissions on the Anki repo and started helping with code reviews. This was a huge milestone for me!

At this point, Anki is a part-time job for me. I'm happy to do what I love while being able to financially support myself and my family.

What tool, addon or anything else do you wish existed ?

Nothing. If I want a particular tool, I develop it :) More seriously, I want a comprehensive tool to copy sentences with sources and screenshots and generate Anki cards automatically. This is something I already developed a basic tool called hoarder for years ago, but it can be a lot better. I’m also interested in using speech recognition for language learning. I already have an add-on developed that I use to transcribe mined sentences, but I want to take this a step further and maybe rework it as a browser extension that transcribes YouTube videos on the fly and generate cards.

Abdo is available for freelance add-on development.