SubtitleTerms

An Anki plug-in for turning subtitles—or more broadly any text document—into flashcards for language learning. Once using SubtitleTerms cards, you can learn a language through your TV show of choice and generate cards episode by episode, adding newly encountered terms to your repertoire as you gradually develop mastery over the language.

<div> <img src="images/dialog_example.webp" alt="Dialog for creating notes with SubtitleTerms." width="30%" align="top">       <img src="images/note_concise_example.webp" alt="Anki card for 真" width="30%">       <img src="images/note_long_example.webp" alt="Anki card for 了" width="30%"> </div>

Currently Supported Language Pairs

• Chinese (Simplified) → English
• Chinese (Traditional) → English

Installation

The plug-in can be installed through the normal means by using the in-app plug-in search, or copying the code:

1790506305

To make full use of the plug-in, FFmpeg must be installed and present on the PATH. FFmpeg is a free and open-source tool for handling multimedia files, and is used to extract subtitles from videos. Many guides for installing FFmpeg and adding it to your PATH are available. If you don't wish to install FFmpeg or are unable to, subtitles can be extracted into a .srt (SubRip Text) formatted file with another tool, and imported with SubtitleTerms from the text file.

Usage

Creating Decks

The dialog to create a deck can be brought up with File > SubtitleTerms: Import in the toolbar.

• File: The file from which cards will be generated, which can either be a video container or text file.

• Deck Name: The file name will be inserted for convenience, but this can be edited.

• Subtitle: If the file selected is a video container with subtitles, this will be a drop-down list from which the relevant subtitle stream can be selected. Otherwise, this option is irrelevant.

• Dictionary: A drop-down containing the supported translation/bilingual dictionaries of SubtitleTerms. For expanding this support, see Contributing. The language on the left will be the language of the subtitles/text which you're trying to learn, and the language on the right is the language terms will be translated to.

On first use, it may take some time as the relevant dictionary is downloaded, in addition to the other processes that allow the plug-in to work, so please be patient.

Subtitled Videos

When a video file is selected in the import dialog, SubtitleTerms will attempt to glean the subtitles available, and the relevant one can be selected from the drop-down. As per Installation, this is reliant upon FFmpeg being installed and in the PATH. Depending on how the subtitles are stored, such as if the subtitle streams are stored as bitmap images, it may not be possible for FFmpeg to extract the text.

Depending on the video selected, it can take a long time to extract the subtitles. This is a process bounded by your own hardware, so please be patient.

Text Files

For text files, .srt (SubRip Text) is specifically supported so as to only parse the subtitle text and not the timestamp information for terms to create cards from. Other text files can also be selected, but will be parsed whole as generic text.

Frequencies

The frequency field of a note refers to the number of times it has been encountered when importing cards. When importing, existing notes are also updated with new counts. If you don't wish to update frequencies on import, deselect the 'Update Frequencies' checkbox in the import dialog.

Updating

There are two actions under Tools in the toolbar: SubtitleTerms: Update Note Types and Subtitle Terms: Update Notes.

Update Note Types will overwrite card styling and formatting as well as add missing fields, while Update Notes will update the source dictionaries and overwrite fields. This can be useful to ensure your notes are up to date with regards to the plugin or the source dictionaries from which the glosses are derived, in addition to being able to revert changes you may have made.

As Update Notes downloads new copies of translation dictionaries relevant to the note types you're using, this can take some time depending on your connection speeds, so please be patient.

Adding/Editing Terms

While the main burden of creating notes should be borne by the plug-in, there may be times where you wish to add cards or edit existing cards. For adding cards, you can add a card to the deck, and after filling in the term field use Subtitle Terms: Update Notes in order to fill in the rest of the information. Similarly for editing, you can use Subtitle Terms: Update Notes to update the other fields after making changes to the term field.

Converting Existing Cards

Updating notes and note types is done by name, which allows for the possibility of converting preexisting notes. To do so, you at least need to know the name of the note type you're targeting.

In order to get the note type name used by SubtitleTerms, importing to generate some temporary cards is the easiest way. Otherwise, the format is SubtitleTerms {lang_from}_2_{lang_to}, where {lang_from} and {lang_to} are the IETF formatted language tags for the two languages, such that Chinese (Simplified) to English would be SubtitleTerms zh-Hans_2_en.

Delete any temporary cards and note types you created as suggested above. Then, rename the note type for the cards you wish to convert to the name you've gathered in the methods above. Then, rename the primary field to terms.

Now you should be able to activate Tools > SubtitleTerms: Update Note Types and Tools > SubtitleTerms: Update Notes in that order to have your notes be fully updated. You may need to go back and delete redudant fields or edit card templates to use fields you'd created personally, but everything SubtitleTerms needs should now be present.

Contributing

Adding Dictionaries

While the current set of translation dictionaries offered is limited, my hope is to expand the list to provide utility to learners of more languages. The primary dependency for doing so is up-to-date source dictionaries that are machine-parsable and freely available for download. As an example, CC-CEDICT provides a public domain, collaborative, and continually updated dictionary available through a single downloadable file formatted to be parsed and presented by other software. Suggestions of sources for other dictionaries between any two languages can be made by creating an Issue with the 'enhancement' tag.

Development

The project is built with hatching to serve the unique requirements for distributing an Anki plug-in, while uv is still used as the package manager. Use the following command to build the distributable, as well as to vendor packages for use in local development when testing in Anki.

hatch build -t zipped-directory

Currently the conversion of Qt user-interface files into Python is not automated. Changes should only be made to .ui files with QtCreator, and Python files generated with the following command:

uv run pyuic6 -o src/subtitleterms/ui/importdialog.py src/subtitleterms/ui/importdialog.ui