Walkthrough

A brief tour through a normal Add-On study session.

While Pindu works from imported text, existing card content, or bespoke generated practice equally, every learning session goes through the same stages.

In a normal Anki session, you choose a deck to study, Anki's SRS determines which words you need to see, and then you loop through them: review, grade, commit. A Pindu session is similar: you choose a deck to study, you build reading practice informed by Anki's SRS, and then you loop through the passages: read, mark, commit.

Modeling vocabulary

Figure 1: Pindu's Vocabulary Model.

Pindu uses your Anki collection to build a model of your vocabulary, illustrated with the Bullseye in Figure 1. The model is based on the SRS "retrievability" of every word in your collection: the probability that you can recall its meaning. Pindu also infers your familiarity with some words outside the collection. The vocabulary model drives readability scoring, text generation, reader display modes, and other features throughout the app.

Preparing passages

At a minimum, Pindu's engine will analyze input text for various statistics including "readability", which is the average retrievability across the words of a passage. Figure 2 shows an example. Since readability is based on your personal collection and its SRS state, the metric is entirely personal, separating Pindu from static graded readers.

Figure 2: The Readability Metric. Per-word retrievability collapses to a passage-wide score.

In more involved workflows, like wholesale text generation, the Pindu engine will iterate over candidate passages, optimizing readability alongside other measures like target length, topicality, nativeness, etc. We use the word "releveling" to refer to modifying a text's readability while holding other measures constant. "Rewording" refers to substituting in certain target words while maintaining other measures.

Reading, marking, and committing

The reader displays the prepared text and provides glosses, scaffolding, and tools for working through unfamiliar vocabulary and grammar without leaving the reading flow. It is also where you mark challenging words, which closes the loop for the SRS back-end.

Reading aids

The Pindu reader differentiates between formatting, glossing, and scaffolding as three levels of reading aid. Formatting includes subtle spacing between words and coloring certain difficult or key words. Glossing includes in-the-flow help such as sidebar definitions and TTS. Scaffolding includes out-of-the-flow aids like external dictionaries, passage-level audio, and translation. Together, these systems support reading comprehension and vocabulary study.

Marking and committing

As you read, you click challenging words once for "Hard" or twice for "Again". Unclicked words are implicitly "Good". These are the same labels used in a normal Anki review. Figure 3 illustrates the process.

Figure 3: Click-to-mark. Clicking marks a word for SRS review without leaving the reading flow.

Once you finish reading the passage and have marked the words you struggled with, you simply commit it, which locks in the word marks and submits them to Anki's SRS as if you had reviewed them normally. Anki will update due dates and intervals accordingly, and your next session and next reading will thus reflect your progress.