Capture words from the web straight into Anki

If you keep an Anki deck for the language you’re learning, the bottleneck is rarely the algorithm. It’s the moment between “I just saw a word I want to remember” and that word being a card. This post is about closing that gap.

Krendo is a Chrome extension for translating selected text on any web page and saving the words you want to remember — along with the sentence they came from. As of v0.10.0 it exports those saved words to an Anki .apkgfile you can import directly into the desktop app. No AnkiConnect, no cloud, no plugins on Anki’s side.

The whole loop

1. Read normally. Open an article in your target language. We use Bulgarian-language news as the running example here, but anything in any of the 190+ supported languages works.
2. Select a word, press Ctrl + Space (Control + Space on Mac). The Krendo overlay opens inline, next to the selection. It shows the translation, the dictionary entry, and the part-of-speech breakdown.
3. Hit Save.The word goes into your local library along with the sentence it came from, the article title, and a link back. If you’ve already saved that word from another article, the new sentence is added as another context — not a duplicate.
4. Optionally, tag or note it.Tags are how you’ll find words later — “business”, “news”, “cooking”, whatever your mental buckets are. Notes are a place for a personal gloss (“remember the false friend”).
5. Open the web companion at krendo.app/app. Your saved library lives here. Filter to a specific tag, a specific status (new, learning, stronger), or a date range.
6. Click Export → Anki (.apkg).The export respects whatever you’ve filtered to. If you’ve narrowed to “tag = news, status = learning, saved this month,” that’s exactly what shows up in the deck.
7. Open Anki, File → Import, pick the .apkg.Cards appear under a new “Krendo” deck in whatever Anki notetype you already use.

That’s it. The friction point that traditionally killed vocabulary capture — manually typing the word, the translation, the example sentence, and the source into a flashcard — is now zero clicks per card.

What the cards look like

Each note has the same fields you’d build by hand if you were making a thoughtful card from scratch:

• Front:the word, plus the sentence it came from. Context is non-negotiable for retention — seeing a word in the sentence you originally encountered it in is the single strongest cue available.
• Back: the translation, the part of speech, the dictionary entry, a link to the source article, and any personal note you added.
• Tags: whatever tags you applied in Krendo, plus krendo, sl:<source-code>, and tl:<target-code> so you can filter Krendo-imported cards inside Anki by source or target language.
• GUIDs are stable.Each note uses Krendo’s internal word id as its Anki guid. If you export the same word twice (after editing the note, say), re-importing updates the existing card instead of creating a duplicate.

Word lists are how you make targeted decks

The library you accumulate is going to be heterogeneous — business words next to cooking words next to tech jargon. That’s fine for the spaced-review queue inside Krendo, which handles mixing automatically. It’s less ideal for Anki, where you might want a deck for one topic at a time.

Krendo has lists for this. A list is a named collection of saved words, either pinned manually (“just these fifteen”) or generated by a filter (“every word tagged business that I saved last month”). Filter your library, save the filter as a list, hit Export from the list page, and you have a focused .apkg.

The pattern that works well in practice: one list per topic, one list per source domain you read a lot, and one open “learning” list for the words you’re actively working through.

Why .apkg and not AnkiConnect

AnkiConnect — the popular Anki add-on that opens a local HTTP endpoint — is a great piece of work. It would let Krendo push cards into Anki live, without an export step.

The reason we shipped .apkg first is that AnkiConnect requires the Anki desktop app to be running, with the add-on installed, while you’re browsing. That’s a hard prerequisite for many people — some run Anki only on mobile, some open the desktop app only during dedicated study sessions, some haven’t installed the add-on. .apkg works for everyone who has Anki, in any state, on any platform that imports the standard format.

AnkiConnect support is on the roadmap as an opt-in second mode for users who want the zero-export-step workflow. We’re not in a hurry — the .apkg path covers the broader audience first.

What v1 doesn’t include

Two honest gaps to know about before you commit to this workflow:

• No audio in the exported deck (yet).Krendo plays TTS in the inline overlay and the review session, but the .apkg export doesn’t embed audio files. If pronunciation is important to your study, the standard Anki addon AwesomeTTS or hypertts can pronounce cards on-demand using your installed Anki TTS voices — the Krendo-exported cards work with those addons unchanged. A future Krendo version may embed audio directly; for now, lean on Anki’s side.
• No automatic re-export on changes.If you add a new note to a saved word in Krendo and want that to show up on the card you already imported, you have to re-export and re-import. The stable GUID means Anki updates the existing card; you don’t get duplicates. But the act of re-export is manual.

A common question: doesn’t this replace Krendo’s own review?

No — and it’s worth being explicit about this. If you already keep a serious Anki deck, you probably want all of your spaced repetition in one place. Krendo’s built-in review is for users who don’t use Anki, or who want a lighter quick-pass for the most recent saves. The two are complementary, not competing, and most users we’ve heard from use both — Krendo for capture and a fast in-browser review, Anki as the long-term retention engine.

Try it

Install Krendo, save a handful of words from whatever you’re reading today, open the web companion, hit Export. If the resulting deck doesn’t do what you’d expect of a card you’d build by hand, tell us — that’s exactly the feedback the .apkg writer was built to act on.

Last updated 2026-05-22.