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Import into Anki

Hanzi Constellation is a map, not a drill. Mark what you know, export the rest, and let the SRS app you already use do the scheduling.

What the files contain

On Your sky, open any chart or study set and choose ⇩ Export. The menu offers up to two files, each whole or unlearned only — just the characters you haven’t marked yet, or the words with one still unmarked.

Characters: one line per character — Character · Pinyin · Zhuyin · Meaning · Top words. Top words are the three most common words the character appears in, each with its reading and meaning, so a card can teach the character in company, not in isolation.

Vocabulary (study sets with a word list): one line per word — Word · Pinyin · Zhuyin · Meaning · Characters. The characters are listed with the reading each takes inside that word, and the usual reading beside it when the two differ: 睡覺 lists 覺 as jiào, usually jué. A word the map doesn’t hold gets no card — without a reading or a meaning it would be a bare string of characters — so the menu’s count is the number of cards you get.

The Hanzi Constellation note types

⇩ Download the note types (hanzi-constellation.apkg)

Open it once — double-click it on the desktop, or open it with AnkiMobile or AnkiDroid. It adds two note types, Hanzi Constellation for the character file and Hanzi Constellation Vocabulary for the vocabulary file, each with the five fields its file has. It also adds one sample card of each, 青 and 睡覺, in a deck called Hanzi Constellation (Anki only installs a note type that a card uses). Delete the samples if you like; the note types stay.

The front shows the character, or the word, alone in kai. The back shows the reading in pinyin and zhuyin, a button that speaks it with a Taiwan-Mandarin system voice, the meaning, and the top words or the characters one per line. Cards follow Anki’s night mode.

Anki on the desktop

File → Import, pick the .tsv file, and you’re nearly done: the file opens with header lines Anki reads on its own (tab separator, HTML off, note type), so the preview should already show five clean columns. With the note types above installed, Anki selects the right one and maps every column by name; without them, choose any note type with five fields and map them in order. Pick the deck and import. Anki skips duplicates by the first field, so re-importing after more exports is safe — existing cards keep their scheduling.

AnkiMobile / AnkiDroid

Save the file where your phone can see it (Files, Drive, AirDrop), then open it with the Anki app — both mobile apps import shared files the same way the desktop does. From the iPhone app, the share sheet on any chart’s export sends the file straight across.

Making it your own

The note types are yours to change once installed: Tools → Manage Note Types → Hanzi Constellation → Cards. To also drill the other direction, add a card type whose front is {{Meaning}} and whose back is {{Character}} (or {{Word}} on the vocabulary type). The speaker button is {{tts zh_TW:Character}} — the same Taiwan-Mandarin voice the map’s speaker buttons use.

Using another app?

The lines starting with # at the top of the file are Anki’s import directives. Any other tool that reads tab-separated files — Quizlet, a spreadsheet, your own script — can use the file too: just delete those lines first.

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