5 ms·

Agreed, Anki has really helped me with learning new languages. The creation of cards was always a slog though, so recently I've been playing with an Anki MCP se

Agreed, Anki has really helped me with learning new languages. The creation of cards was always a slog though, so recently I've been playing with an Anki MCP server hooked up to Claude. I can dump my iTalki lessons in, or ask Claude to make cards based on a song I've been listening to, etc and get a bunch of relevant cards generated for me. It's honestly been kind of magic.

jama211 8mo ago
That’s… genius. This might get me using anki again, I gave up because of the friction of card creation. Thank you for this!
- throwforfeds 8mo ago
  You're welcome! Here's the one I've been using: https://github.com/ankimcp/anki-mcp-server https://github.com/ankimcp/anki-mcp-server I've definitely hit walls with Anki over the years, and while the community decks help a lot, it's really nice to just tell Claude "can you take this assignment my tutor gave me, extract all the infinitive verbs, and then make cloze style cards for conjugations at an A1/A2 level?" and get it all done in a couple minutes.
  - guiambros 8mo ago
    Ha, I love this! In a way making the cards helps a ton to learn the content and decide what's really important to retain. On the other hand, it's such a slog that I usually end up relying on community cards, or skipping it altogether. The MCP idea may be a nice middle ground. Will give it a try for an upcoming exam.
FrinkleFrankle 8mo ago
Yeah, llms change the game for card creation. I'm trying to learn Rust (programming language) and I have Codex ingesting books/articles and generating sensible cards from them. It's able to consistently get the HTML right for syntax highlighting in examples too.
philipdavis 8mo ago
The MCP approach is brilliant! I've been solving the same friction problem from a different angle. I mostly use Anki to improve my vocabulary, and ended up building a tiny browser-side tool for myself (now called Wordwise / Anki Dictionary) that lets me double click any word on a webpage, get a clean definition + the sentence it appears in, and export it straight into Anki with one click. It’s been a surprisingly good middle ground between fully manual cards and fully LLM dumps. If anyone’s curious: https://wordwise.me https://wordwise.me

jama211 8mo ago

That’s… genius. This might get me using anki again, I gave up because of the friction of card creation. Thank you for this!

throwforfeds 8mo ago
You're welcome! Here's the one I've been using: https://github.com/ankimcp/anki-mcp-server https://github.com/ankimcp/anki-mcp-server I've definitely hit walls with Anki over the years, and while the community decks help a lot, it's really nice to just tell Claude "can you take this assignment my tutor gave me, extract all the infinitive verbs, and then make cloze style cards for conjugations at an A1/A2 level?" and get it all done in a couple minutes.
- guiambros 8mo ago
  Ha, I love this! In a way making the cards helps a ton to learn the content and decide what's really important to retain. On the other hand, it's such a slog that I usually end up relying on community cards, or skipping it altogether. The MCP idea may be a nice middle ground. Will give it a try for an upcoming exam.

FrinkleFrankle 8mo ago

Yeah, llms change the game for card creation. I'm trying to learn Rust (programming language) and I have Codex ingesting books/articles and generating sensible cards from them. It's able to consistently get the HTML right for syntax highlighting in examples too.

philipdavis 8mo ago

The MCP approach is brilliant! I've been solving the same friction problem from a different angle. I mostly use Anki to improve my vocabulary, and ended up building a tiny browser-side tool for myself (now called Wordwise / Anki Dictionary) that lets me double click any word on a webpage, get a clean definition + the sentence it appears in, and export it straight into Anki with one click. It’s been a surprisingly good middle ground between fully manual cards and fully LLM dumps. If anyone’s curious: https://wordwise.me https://wordwise.me