So I got tired of the manual card creation grind. I read a lot of stuff in PDFs, chat apps, work docs — basically everywhere except the browser — and I kept a running list of “words I want to add to Anki” that just grew and grew because actually making the cards took forever. Look up the word, find IPA on Wiktionary, find a good example sentence, type in etymology if I care about that… like 2-3 min per card minimum. My review habit was fine, my card creation was not.
Yomitan is great but it’s browser-only, so that didn’t help for most of my reading.
Anyway I ended up building something for this. It’s called SelectAndTranslate — you select text anywhere on your desktop and get a translation popup (uses GPT-4o so it handles context/idioms pretty well). The main thing for Anki users though is that it logs vocabulary automatically with definition, IPA, etymology, and the sentence you found it in. Then you export as CSV and import into Anki. Not as smooth as AnkiConnect would be, I know — that’s on my list.
There’s also an OCR mode (Alt+W) for translating stuff in images, screenshots, video subs, etc. And kind of a weird feature where it puts your saved vocabulary on rotating desktop wallpapers, like passive exposure. Not sure if that’s actually useful or just a gimmick tbh.
Few things to be upfront about:
- Windows 10+ only, no Mac/Linux
- Selected text gets sent to OpenAI’s API for translation. Your vocab data stays local (there’s no server), but wanted to mention the API part
- If you already have a solid Yomitan + browser mining setup for Japanese, this probably won’t replace that
- It’s not an Anki add-on, it’s a standalone app
It’s free — no ads, no accounts, no paid tier or anything.
Website to Download: is.gd/1xldbS
Would be curious what people think. Especially whether CSV import is a dealbreaker vs AnkiConnect, and what fields you’d want in the export that I might be missing.