Providing easier import from Anki to SuperMemo
Request
N. wrote:
I think that I'll continue to use SRS for the rest of my career, and I wish you'd help me (or the Anki community) by providing a better/easier way for Anki users to port their collections into SuperMemo 17, so we could easily migrate to your software/algorithm
Reply
Cooperation
Ideally, all platforms should agree on some data transfer definition. However, this may not be easy. SuperMemo XML definition works well at the level of Questions + Answers with the learning process, however, various incompatibilities and extensions of individual versions make it still of limited use in transfers between platforms (15 years after the origin of the XML initiative).
Import to SuperMemo 18
In SuperMemo 18, we added rudimentary import of text files exported from Anki. See this video. This does not transfer the learning process.
An excellent, more universal transfer tutorial was written by this user (UPDATED link)
If you have older SuperMemos, here is a 5 min. video tutorial that shows how to transfer Anki text exports to SuperMemo 17. In this method, the original Anki export is converted to Q-and-A format with Notepad++.
Community Made Anki to SuperMemo converter
Amilo of supermemo.wiki community made this converter: https://github.com/AM429/anki2sm. I have found it good enough to convert cards with text, audio and images (though I have struggled a little to get the right things showing up on front but I think that might just be template issues).
If you have issues with it, Amilo is responsive and can likely help you out.
Import to supermemo.com
To consider this option for the supermemo.com platform I would need information on the content and export possibilities in Anki. In particular: (1) can you export the history of repetitions (date, grade) for each card, (2) in what form is the content of the card set exported, what is the most common form of cards used by Anki users, is tree structure of cards (sections, units, etc.) allowed, if yes is there a depth limit? Although SuperMemo.com commercial courses are rich in format we tend to keep users’ content very simple and I’m not sure this would be acceptable to import Anki developed content successfully