Convert YouTube to Anki (Language Learning)

Convert YouTube To Anki turns any YouTube video, playlist, or channel into vocabulary flashcards in your target language — automatically.

Paste a URL, pick your target and native language (both dropdowns are searchable, with a one-click swap button), and it scrapes the video's caption track, pulls out the vocabulary, translates each word, and adds it as a new card — skipping anything already in your deck. By default each card reads its front aloud using Anki's built-in text-to-speech, or you can switch "Audio source" to play the actual spoken clip pulled from the video instead.

Supports 35 languages as either target or native (Arabic, Bulgarian, Catalan, Chinese Simplified/Traditional, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Filipino, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hebrew, Hindi, Hungarian, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Norwegian, Persian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Slovak, Slovenian, Spanish, Swedish, Thai, Turkish, Ukrainian, Vietnamese), with romanization support for Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Russian, Ukrainian, Bulgarian, Greek, Arabic, and Hindi.

Requirements

• Anki 2.1.50 or newer.
• An internet connection (captions, translation, and playlist lookups are all fetched live).
• A system text-to-speech voice installed for your target language, so cards can read words aloud with the default TTS audio source. (Most OSes ship several by default — nothing else to install for basic use.)
• Optional — ffmpeg installed and available on your system PATH. Only needed if you turn on either of these:
  • "Include a screenshot of the video moment" (adds a frame from the video to each card)
  • "Audio source" set to one of the video-audio options (plays the real spoken clip instead of TTS)
  Everything else works with no extra setup. If ffmpeg isn't found, the dialog detects this and disables those two options entirely (with a tooltip explaining why) rather than letting the run fail partway through.

1. In Anki, open Tools > Convert YouTube To Anki...
2. Paste a YouTube video URL — or check "URL is a playlist or channel" and paste a playlist/channel URL instead, setting how many videos to pull from it.
3. Pick your target and native language, or create a new deck (leave blank to auto-name it from the video's title). Most Advanced-tab settings are remembered per language pair — switching from Chinese to Japanese restores Japanese's own settings instead of carrying over Chinese-specific ones like "nouns/verbs only".
4. Optionally turn on any of: skip stop words, skip words that translate to themselves, include an example sentence, include romanization, limit to the N most frequent words, preview and edit every card before it's added, or add whole sentences instead of single words. Every setting with an "ⓘ" icon has a tooltip explaining exactly what it does.
5. Click OK. Your choices are remembered for next time — no need to re-enter them.

New cards land in a dedicated note type named YouTube Vocab (Target → Native), tagged with the video so you can find them later, and duplicates already in the deck are skipped automatically.

⚠️ Be aware

YouTube limits how often it will answer caption/video requests from one network. If you're pulling from a large playlist or channel, or running this many times in a short window, you may get temporarily rate-limited (usually shows up as a timeout or a "too many requests" error). If that happens, either wait a while before trying again, or switch networks (e.g. a VPN) to continue.

If you find this add-on useful, consider donating to show your support and help fund further development — thank you!