Blitzer for Anki

Blitzer for Anki helps you turn the things you read, watch, and listen to into vocabulary cards—and keep those cards focused on words you actually want to learn.

You can paste an article to build a word list, make cards from a recording with example sentences and audio or video clips, and stop familiar or unwanted words from appearing in future lists. You review what gets added before it becomes part of your deck, all from inside Anki.

The text and recording features rely on Blitzer and Blitzline, which are set up separately. This add-on brings their tools into Anki; you do not need to use their command-line interfaces for everyday work here.

What you can do

Make vocabulary cards from text

Paste text or open a text file in Build Vocabulary, choose its language, and get a list of the words it contains. This works for articles, book passages, subtitles, study materials, or anything else you can supply as text.

You can:

• Sort words by how often they occur or where they first appear.
• Filter out words you already know or do not want to study.
• Choose which words and example sentences to keep, and edit translations and notes.
• Preview the cards, choose a deck and card style, and decide how to handle duplicates.
• Save a draft for later or export the list for use elsewhere.

Learn from recordings

The Blitzline Panel turns an audio or video recording into vocabulary you can study. You can also supply an existing transcript. Depending on your setup, it can transcribe the recording, proofread or translate the transcript, find vocabulary, and prepare short audio or video clips for your cards.

Review the words, translations, and examples before adding them to Anki. You can correct a transcript, set aside words that need more attention, save your work, and resume later. This is useful for studying vocabulary from a lesson, conversation, podcast, or video while keeping the original context close at hand.

Stop unwanted words from coming back

Once your card types and languages are configured, suspending a card adds its word to an exclusion list by default. Future vocabulary lists can then skip that word. For the default card type, the word comes from the bold text in its example sentence.

You can change this behavior or assign a separate keyboard shortcut. In Anki's Browser, Blitzer → Exclude Selected Words lets you exclude words from several selected cards at once, with the option to suspend those cards too.

Recognize vocabulary you have learned

Vocabulary Graduation looks at your review history and suggests words you may know well enough to leave out of future vocabulary lists. You choose the learning criteria and review the suggestions before accepting them. Automatic graduation is optional.

Graduation changes what future lists include; it does not delete your existing cards or stop their reviews. If a word becomes difficult again, you can reconsider its exclusion.

Manage your excluded vocabulary

The Exclusion Manager gives you one place to search, edit, import, and export your exclusion lists, see why a word is excluded, and reverse previous decisions.

You can exclude an exact spelling, such as cats, or a whole word family, such as cat and its related forms where dictionary support is available. This lets you keep studying unfamiliar forms of a word or skip the family altogether. List changes can be previewed before applying them, and backups help you recover earlier versions.

Use your own decks and card styles

You can use multiple languages, decks, and note types—the layouts Anki uses to create your cards. Assign a language to each deck, override it for a particular note type, and choose which field or part of an example sentence contains the word to exclude.

The included defaults recognize Blitzline's Blitzer Basic cards. Other card styles need a one-time setup. When creating new cards, you can choose how words, translations, and examples fit into your existing fields.

Getting started

1. Install the .ankiaddon package through Tools → Add-ons → Install from file…, then restart Anki. The add-on targets desktop Anki 24.06.3 or newer.
2. Follow the setup guide to connect the companion tools, choose your languages, and configure your decks and exclusion lists.
3. Open Blitzer in Anki's menu bar and choose a tool. The Browser has its own Blitzer menu for working with selected cards. On macOS, these menus appear at the top of the screen.

This is an early release; desktop compatibility checks are still in progress. See verification status for current evidence and remaining checks.

For contributors: development guide, extension guide, and design plan.