Setting up Chinese Support on Anki

Kunal Shah

Kunal Shah / March 17, 2021

1 min read

Today, I found an addon, Chinese Support Redux, that makes learning chinese vocabular quite a bit more effective when using Anki by automatically translating chinese characters and attaching the right pronunciation from Google Translate.

The trouble is that the addon has found itself without a maintainer recently and is consequently quite tricky to set up. Here's how I did it.

Steps

  1. Delete the plugin from Anki add-ons
  2. Download and unzip this repo.
  3. Drag the chinese directory from folder into the your Anki addons21 folder (for me, this is /Users/kunal/Library/Application Support/Anki2/addons21)
  4. Rename chinese to 1128979221, the original addon code.
  5. Restart Anki and follow the original usage instructions to create and auto-populate cards.

Specifications

  • macOS Big Sur 11.1
  • Anki Version 2.1.41

Credit to Dave Fontenot for directing me towards the plugin in the first place, and to psiii for the original fix mentioned.