Sea Minerator

Turn the English words you pick up each day into Anki cards you'll remember.

Sea Minerator is an Anki add-on. Paste your list of new words, an AI writes short example sentences for each one, you keep the ones you like, and each sentence becomes a card: the word highlighted, translated the way that sentence uses it, with audio and a badge naming its grammar.

Is it for you?

Everyone learns English their own way. Sea Minerator is built around one of them, the one I use every day: learn each word inside a real sentence, hear it, and review it with spaced repetition.

It fits you if:

• you collect new words and expressions during the day (from series, work, music, classes) and want them in Anki without typing every card;
• you'd rather remember "I have bought a new car" than "buy, bought, bought";
• you want to hear each sentence and see its grammar (present perfect, phrasal verb, modal verbs…) right on the card.

It's probably not for you if you want ready-made decks, word → definition cards, or a language other than English to learn. Explanations and translations, though, come in your own language: 20 are available, from Portuguese and Spanish to Japanese and Arabic.

How it works

1. Paste your list of the day. In Anki, open Tools → Mine vocabulary…, type one word or expression per line, choose a deck and click Mine.

2. Keep the sentences you like. For each word you get a short explanation in your language, its translations, its class and example sentences. Check the ones that should become cards.

3. Study. Click Create cards. Each checked sentence is one card:

• Front: the sentence, with the word in color, and its audio. A badge names the grammar subject (Present perfect, Modal verbs…); a vocabulary-only sentence has none.
• Back: the word as the sentence uses it, its translation in that sentence (same person and tense), its class and its grammar topic.

The whole batch is one undo step (Edit → Undo).

Already have your sentences?

Got them from a class, a book or a teacher? Tools → Import cards… turns them into the same kind of card, without the AI. Paste a front line and a back line for each card, select a part and press Ctrl+B to highlight it, and pick the grammar topic: it becomes the badge.

Install

Sea Minerator needs Anki 25.07 or later for desktop (Windows, macOS or Linux). The cards it creates also work in AnkiDroid and AnkiMobile.

In Anki, open Tools → Add-ons → Get Add-ons…, paste the code 1472156233, and restart Anki. New versions then arrive through Anki's own add-on updates. See the AnkiWeb page.

To install from a file instead, download sea-minerator.ankiaddon from the latest release, open Tools → Add-ons → Install from file…, pick the file, and restart Anki.

Set up

Open Tools → Sea Minerator settings…:

1. Choose your native language.
2. Choose an AI provider and paste its key:
   • Gemini: the easiest start, with a free key from Google AI Studio;
   • OpenAI or a compatible service (OpenRouter, Groq…);
   • Anthropic (Claude);
   • Local: a model running on your computer with Ollama or LM Studio, no key needed.
3. Click Load models, pick one, Test connection, then Save.

By default the cards speak with your computer's own voice. For a recording that sounds the same on every device, set Audio source to Google Translate (free, unofficial) or Gemini.

Privacy: the add-on has no server of its own. Your list of words goes to the AI provider you chose, with the grammar topics already in your collection, so new cards reuse them. If you chose a recorded audio source, the sentences go to that service (Gemini falls back to Google Translate). Your key is stored in plain text in Anki's add-on folder on your computer.

Learn more

• User guide: what goes on each card and how to search for it, importing rules, every setting, and audio in depth.
• Development: run the add-on straight from this repository and run the tests.

Building from source

The add-on's only runtime dependency, httpx, is vendored into src/seaminerator/_vendor/ with its own dependencies, because an .ankiaddon has no install step. Only pure-Python packages belong there, since the add-on ships as one zip for every platform.

bash scripts/vendor.sh   # (re)populate src/seaminerator/_vendor/
bash scripts/build.sh    # produce dist/sea-minerator.ankiaddon

For development:

pip install -e ".[dev]"
pytest -q
ruff check .
ruff format --check .
mypy src

License

MIT, see LICENSE.