GuessWithAnki: An Anki Add-On That Reorders Cards So You Can Guess Words You've Never Seen

BlaiseLabs · reddit · 2026-10-29

A Japanese learner built GuessWithAnki, an Anki add-on that reorders your deck so new words become guessable on first sight:

Idea: break words into their building blocks (kanji/components/radicals) and study the highest-leverage blocks first, so many unseen words can be guessed in both meaning and reading without individual memorization.
Method: the optimization is framed as greedy algorithms plus graph theory; the write-up and video explain the full analysis.
LLM integration: the add-on runs without local LLMs, but installing Ollama meaningfully improves the sorting algorithm.
Open source on GitHub, with a technical write-up on GitHub Pages.

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