I think you are underestimating how effective flashcards can be, particularly as part of a larger system. I'm starting a 4-year PhD in September to develop a sy

I think you are underestimating how effective flashcards can be, particularly as part of a larger system. I'm starting a 4-year PhD in September to develop a system that will gloss words (in text/subtitles in a variety of clients, like FF, ebook readers, media players, etc.) that aren't in your (Anki-compatible) flashcards. That means you get to read "normal" text, enriched with glosses only for words you don't know. The idea is basically to provide automated scaffolding at exactly the level the learner is currently at vocab-wise. There is an extension to Anki that does what you suggest with the video frames (at least for Japanese?), and I want to integrate that (or similar) at some stage. But there are heaps of cool ideas to implement if you take the flashcard database as a first approximation of a representation of the learner's (lexical) knowledge of a language and then enrich real-world texts that the learner is interested in with enough help to appreciate the real-world content. The beauty with having a representation of the learner's knowledge is that you can take a number of different approaches (say depending on the % of unknown words) or even just let the learner decide how much help they want/need on a given content consumption session. With even a small number of users the data generated will also be pretty awesome for research purposes. It's pretty clunky still (I haven't started the thesis yet) but it is all going to be completely open-source and I definitely hope I'm not the only one to contribute to it, so hopefully it will get some momentum at some stage, and there will be heaps of clients that can talk to the server part. https://transcrob.es https://transcrob.es