It is easy to highlight twenty unfamiliar words while reading. If all of them become Anki cards, the review queue grows faster than your useful vocabulary.
A better workflow selects a few relevant phrases, preserves their context, and creates cards that support active recall. Quality beats volume.
Choose phrases instead of isolated words
Do not save only “account”; save “take into account” when that is the expression in the article. Do not save only “place”; save “take place.” A phrase already contains grammar, typical partners, and realistic meaning.
An expression makes a good card when it recurs, matters to your interests, or carries a meaning you could not safely infer from each word alone.
- Recurring expression
- important to understanding
- personally useful
- connected to one clear context sentence
A useful card structure
Put a short original sentence with the phrase highlighted on the front. The back contains a concise contextual meaning and optionally the source. Avoid long dictionary definitions.
For productive learning, hide the phrase inside the sentence. For less frequent expressions, a recognition card may be enough at first.
- Front: original sentence with gap or highlight
- Back: contextual meaning
- Extra fields: language, topic, and source URL
Export clean CSV data to Anki
Keep one piece of information per field: phrase, meaning, context sentence, URL, and optional tags. During import, map those columns to your note type once.
Tags such as “spanish,” “politics,” or “phrasal-verb” support filtered decks. Avoid a taxonomy that requires more maintenance than learning.
How many cards per article?
Three to five new phrases per article are enough for most learners. With three articles a week, that still creates up to fifteen context-rich cards.
When reviews grow, reduce new cards first. A small collection you actually review and recognize while reading is more useful than a huge archive.
- Select immediately after reading
- review briefly the next day
- delete unhelpful or unclear cards without guilt