NOUNS & ADJECTIVES ONLY German Anki template with automatic cloze deletions & color-coding

THE UPDATED VERSION WORKS WITH VERBS. SEE IT HERE: https://gumroad.com/l/saHJaW

Using the magic of German grammar, this Anki template automatically color-codes nouns by gender and generates cloze deletions without extra clicks or note types—just enter the word and an example sentence. Works for nouns and adjectives/adverbs/etc., just not verbs.

Read more about the card format at www.monoglotanxiety.com

Features

Automatically-generated cloze deletions generated based on the example sentence

Anki basic cards and cloze deletion note types do not play nice. Usually, if you wanted to make a cloze-deletion for an example sentence from one of your basic note types, you’d need to either a) make a whole separate note for the cloze deletion or b) manually make “fake” cloze deletions, which requires you to create aseparate fields for the complete sentence and the “clozed” version with your word removed and replaced a blank or other characters.

That’s a drag, especially since cloze-deletions are a great way to learn words in context.

This card format makes generating cloze deletions painless—just provide an example sentence containing your word and a script in the template takes care of the rest! These “auto-cloze” cards aren’t true Anki cloze deletions, so they don’t require you to use a different note type for your clozes and basic cards. Auto-cloze cards are associated with the same Basic type note as the German-to-translation and translation-to-German cards. Thanks to a bit of grammar magic under the hood, this even works if your word appears in the example in an inflected form.

Nouns color-coded by gender based on article

Nouns are automatically recognized by the card template and color-coded according to gender based on their preceeding article (der/die/das). Plural-only nouns are also color-coded—just write p, plural, plural only, or plural-only in the “Plural” field to indicate that a noun is plural-only. See the how-to for more on plural-only nouns.

If you don’t like my color choices, you can change the colors of the masculine, feminine, neuter, and plural-only CSS classes in the “Styling (shared between cards)” in the card template window.

Intuitive input format

In my early days of exploring the wonders of custom Anki formats, I made the mistake of adding so many specific fields to my cards. One format I used for German had more than 8 fields at one point, with separate places to input noun articles, gender, plural forms, verb conjugations, and and and. It basically made the format unusable since I’d always make mistakes inputting information into all those fields. A lot of that is because Anki’s built in conditional replacement function only works based on field presence/absence. But 8 months later I have a solution to that problem and now the field bloat is finally over.

I really wanted to keep things intuitive for these cards. The order of fields and expected format for input aligns with how German vocabulary is usually shared in list—i.e. article + noun, plural, translation. And conditional formatting behind the scenes allows the same fields to be re-used for different kinds of words without causing any trouble. No separate fields for nouns and non-nouns or anything like that!