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.
That’s… genius. This might get me using anki again, I gave up because of the friction of card creation. Thank you for this!
You're welcome! Here's the one I've been using: 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.
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.
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.