Why hand-made cards fail
Building a card while reading means leaving the page, opening Anki, choosing a deck, typing both sides, and finding your place again. It costs a minute per word and it interrupts the reading that produced the word in the first place. The usual result is a half-filled deck and an abandoned article.
Splitting the job into two phases removes the friction:
- While reading: capture only — word, sentence, page. One click.
- Later: review the batch, fix translations, export, import.
Step 1 — Put a capture tool in your browser
You need something that saves a selected word without taking you off the page. Vocabulary Inbox has a browser extension that does this: select a word or phrase, right-click, and it is saved to your account with the sentence around it and the URL it came from. You can download the extension and load it in your browser's extensions page.
Whatever tool you use, check one thing before committing to it: does it keep the source sentence? A capture tool that saves only the headword gives you the same weak flashcards you would have typed yourself.
Step 2 — Capture while you read, judge later
Read normally. When a word blocks the sentence, save it and keep going. Do not stop to decide whether it deserves a flashcard — that decision is much faster in a list than mid-article, and you will have more information once you see how often the word came up.
Step 3 — Tidy the batch before it becomes cards
Bad cards come from unedited lists. Before exporting, go through the batch once and:
- Delete words you only needed once — place names, one-off technical terms.
- Reduce inflected forms to the form you want to learn, if that is how you study.
- Check that the translation matches the sense used in your sentence, not just the first dictionary sense.
- Trim the saved sentence so the card shows a readable line rather than a whole paragraph.
Ten well-made cards will teach you more than sixty raw ones, and you will not dread the reviews.
Step 4 — Export an Anki-friendly file
Anki imports plain text files where each line is a card and the fields are separated by tabs. In Vocabulary Inbox, the export menu offers an Anki (TSV) option that produces exactly that: front, back, and an extra field holding the definition and the example sentence. CSV, TSV, plain text and JSON exports are available too if you prefer to shape the file yourself.
If your list is in another tool, export to CSV and save it as tab-separated text. Keep one card per line, keep field order consistent, and make sure the file is UTF-8 so accents and non-Latin scripts survive.
Step 5 — Import into Anki
- In Anki, choose File → Import and pick the exported file.
- Choose the deck and the note type you want the cards to land in.
- Set the field separator to Tab, then map each column to a field: first column to the front, second to the back, third to a notes or context field.
- Leave duplicate handling on so re-importing an overlapping batch updates existing notes instead of duplicating them.
- Import, then check a few cards in the browser before you start reviewing.
If your note type has no third field, either add one or drop the extra column before importing — otherwise the context ends up crammed onto the back of the card.
Keeping the two systems in sync
Treat the browser capture as the inbox and Anki as the long-term store. Export on a fixed rhythm — once a week is plenty — and mark what you have already exported so each batch is new. Because the words carry the sentence and the source page, an old card always leads back to the article where you met the word.
If you would rather not run two systems, Vocabulary Inbox also has built-in review exercises, so the same saved words can be practised without exporting at all.
For the reading habit that feeds this workflow, see how to read foreign news articles without losing your place.