anki-miner 2.5.0

Automated Japanese vocabulary mining from anime subtitles with Anki integration

Anki Miner

Turn native Japanese content into Anki vocabulary cards - with screenshots, sentence audio, furigana, pitch accent, and frequency data.

Please leave a ⭐ star if Anki Miner helped you - it helps others find it.

Showcase

Example cards

Installation

Requirements

• ffmpeg on PATH.
  • macOS: brew install ffmpeg
  • Ubuntu/Debian: sudo apt install ffmpeg
  • Windows: download from ffmpeg.org and add to PATH.
• Anki with the AnkiConnect add-on. In Anki: Tools → Add-ons → Get Add-ons, paste code 2055492159, restart.

Download

Grab the installer for your platform from the latest release:

Platform	Installer	Portable
Windows	AnkiMiner-*-Setup.exe	AnkiMiner-Windows-x86_64.zip
Linux (Debian/Ubuntu)	anki-miner_*_amd64.deb	AnkiMiner-*-Linux-x86_64.AppImage
Linux (other)	—	AnkiMiner-Linux-x86_64.tar.gz
macOS (Apple Silicon)	—	AnkiMiner-macOS-arm64.tar.gz

No Python required. Installers and portable archives bundle all dependencies.

Install from PyPI (Python 3.10+)

pipx install anki-miner   # or: pip install anki-miner

Install from source

git clone https://github.com/0xzerolight/anki_miner.git
cd anki_miner
pip install .

Quick Start

After installing, launch Anki Miner from your Start Menu, Applications folder, or app menu. If you installed from PyPI or source, run anki_miner_gui from a terminal. A desktop shortcut is created on first launch; re-run it from Tools → Create Desktop Shortcut… inside the app.

Anki must be running with AnkiConnect installed before mining starts.

Tabs:

• Episode Mining: mine one video/subtitle pair with file selectors and progress tracking.
• Batch Mining: queue a folder of episode/subtitle pairs for sequential processing. Files are paired by episode number, so each folder / queue item should hold a single show (use Multi-Anime Queue for mining multiple series at a time).
• Deck Builder: point at a folder of episode/subtitle pairs and mine the full series into one named deck. Lemmas are ranked by in-series frequency; pick how many to include (all, top N, or a coverage target) and preview before cards are created.
• YouTube: paste one or more URLs, then mine the queue.
• Analytics: history, series difficulty rankings, milestones, undo.
• Settings: Anki, Media, Dictionary, Filtering, YouTube, Themes. Saved to ~/.anki_miner/gui_config.json.

Features

• Deck Builder: point it at a folder with all episodes of a show and it mines the whole series into a single named deck, frequency-ordered, deduped across episodes. Inspired by the approach of jiten.moe / jpdb — free, using media you already have.
• Anki cards with furigana, pitch accent, and word frequency.
• Bold the target word in the sentence so it stands out on the card front.
• Glossary field that combines every enabled dictionary into one card field, compatible with the Senren dictionary-toggle template.
• Word Curator with embedded video player — hear each sentence before you decide, and see every enabled offline dictionary's hit side-by-side.
• Custom card styling — generated cards render cleanly out of the box; no manual Anki note-type styling required.
• User-curated known-words list — add words straight from the curator; they're skipped on every future run.
• Load any Yomitan dictionaries you like, reorder them, and optionally enable Jisho as a slower, rate-limited online fallback (offline dictionaries are recommended for speed).
• YouTube queue: paste a list of URLs, mine the whole list in one click.
• Batch a folder of episode/subtitle pairs for unattended processing.
• Review and edit the word list before any cards are created.
• Audio in MP3 or Opus, at the bitrate you choose — Opus produces much smaller files for the same listening quality.
• Animated screenshots in AVIF or WebP for cards that show a moment of motion instead of a still frame.
• Analytics dashboard with history, undo, milestones, and series difficulty rankings.
• 29 built-in themes (Catppuccin, Gruvbox, Nord, Tokyo Night, Rosé Pine, Dracula, and more) with a favorites list, Ctrl+T to cycle, and custom themes from a JSON file. See the full list below.

Built-in themes (29)

• Ayu — Light, Mirage, Dark
• Catppuccin — Latte (light); Frappé, Macchiato, Mocha (dark)
• Dracula — Dracula, Alucard
• Everforest — Light, Dark
• GitHub — Light; Dark, Dark Dimmed
• Gruvbox — Light Medium, Dark Medium
• Kanagawa — Lotus (light), Wave (dark)
• Rosé Pine — Dawn (light); Main, Moon (dark)
• Solarized — Light, Dark
• Standalone — Light, Dark, Sakura, Nord, One Dark, Tokyo Night

Upstream attribution: LICENSE-THEMES.md. Custom themes: drop a JSON file matching the schema in anki_miner/gui/resources/styles/themes/ into your config dir. Or suggest in an Issue and it will be added for all users.

How It Works

1. Read the subtitles and split Japanese into individual words.
2. Filter to content words you don't already know.
3. Grab a screenshot and audio clip from the video for each line.
4. Look up definitions in your configured offline dictionaries, optionally falling back to Jisho online if enabled (slower, rate-limited).
5. Send the finished cards to Anki.

Dictionaries

Anki Miner looks up definitions through a provider chain you configure. Each lookup tries the providers in order; the first hit wins. Load any number of offline Yomitan-format dictionaries — these are recommended for speed. Jisho is available as an online fallback but is disabled by default because every lookup waits ~0.5s on the API and slows mining substantially.

Add a dictionary in Settings → Add Dictionary… by pointing at a Yomitan .zip archive. Drag entries to reorder the chain. Installed dictionaries are indexed once into ~/.anki_miner/dicts/<dict_id>/index.sqlite and loaded on startup. Structured-content entries are rendered to HTML on import, so card definitions preserve the source dictionary's formatting (definition lists, examples, tags). The dictionary folder location is configurable via Settings → Dictionary → Dictionary Folder — useful for keeping multi-GB Yomitan archives on a separate drive.

Recommended Japanese → English dictionaries — both are JMdict-derived; pick whichever fits your cards, or load both and order them as you like:

• Jitendex — modern JMdict successor with structured-content formatting, example sentences, and richer tags. Best for visually rich cards. Grab the Yomitan archive from the Jitendex releases page.
• JMdict — the original community JMdict project. Plain-text glosses, smaller index, faster to add. Yomitan builds are available from the Yomitan dictionary list or you can rebuild from the EDRDG source.

Install via Settings → Add Dictionary… in either case.

Pitch accent & frequency data

Anki Miner can attach pitch-accent patterns and frequency ranks to each card. Both are loaded from user-supplied files that live at ~/.anki_miner/pitch_accent.csv and ~/.anki_miner/frequency.csv. The Settings pickers accept either a raw CSV/TSV in the expected column shape or a Yomitan-format zip; Yomitan zips are converted to CSV automatically on Save.

Pitch accent

Pick a source and drop it into Settings → Dictionary → Pitch Accent File:

• Kanjium accent list - the community pitch dump as a raw TSV at data/source_files/raw/accents.txt (~124k entries, kanji<TAB>reading<TAB>pattern). Smallest install: rename to pitch_accent.csv and drop straight into ~/.anki_miner/, no Yomitan import step needed.
• アクセント辞典v2 - TheMoeWay's "Recommended" pitch dictionary as a Yomitan zip; richer notation than Kanjium. Point the picker at the .zip.

Install via Settings → Dictionary → Pitch Accent File - the picker accepts raw CSV/TSV or a Yomitan zip (auto-imported to ~/.anki_miner/pitch_accent.csv on Save).

Frequency lists

Pick a source and drop it into Settings → Filtering → Frequency List File:

• JPDB v2.2 Frequency Kana - Kuuuube's "Recommended" frequency list and the real successor to JPDB v2. Good default for mixed media mining.
• BCCWJ SUW LUW Combined - large balanced-corpus rank list from the Balanced Corpus of Contemporary Written Japanese. Complement for users also reading news or novels.

Install via Settings → Filtering → Frequency List File - the picker accepts raw CSV/TSV or a Yomitan zip (auto-imported to ~/.anki_miner/frequency.csv on Save).

YouTube Mining

Paste one or more URLs into the YouTube tab. Each row shows its title, length, and subtitle source as you add it; click Mine to process the whole list. Transient download errors are retried once before a row is marked failed. Cancel is safe at any point.

Manual Japanese subtitles are used when available. Auto-captions are accepted only when YouTube generated them natively from Japanese audio — captions that YouTube produced by machine-translating from another language are skipped, because they don't make usable cards. Even native auto-captions are rougher than manual subtitles, since they lack sentence boundaries.

Gotchas:

• Bot-detection prompts: if YouTube asks "Sign in to confirm you're not a bot", open Settings → Cookies → Browser and pick Firefox or Chrome. Anki Miner pulls cookies from that browser's profile on every fetch.
• Age-restricted videos: same fix.
• Max duration: defaults to 120 minutes. The probe aborts before downloading if the video is longer. Adjust in Settings.

Updates

Anki Miner checks GitHub for new releases on startup (toggle in Settings). When an update is available, a banner offers a one-click download of the asset that matches your install: .deb for Debian/Ubuntu, .AppImage for AppImage, the Inno installer on Windows, the macOS arm64 archive, or the release page for pip/source installs. "Skip this version" suppresses the prompt for that release; the next release prompts again.

Troubleshooting

Issue	Solution
"Cannot connect to Anki"	Start Anki and ensure AnkiConnect is installed.
"Deck not found"	Create the deck in Anki or update the deck name in Settings.
"Note type not found"	Configure your note type's field names in Settings → Anki.
"ffmpeg not found"	Install ffmpeg and add it to PATH.
No definitions found	Add a Yomitan dictionary in Settings → Add Dictionary… (recommended), or enable the Jisho fallback (slower, rate-limited).
Audio is wrong language	The tool tries Japanese audio tracks first, then falls back to the default.
Subtitles out of sync	Use the subtitle offset control in the GUI.

Contributing

Contributions are welcome — bug fixes, dictionary integrations, GUI polish, doc improvements, all sizes.

• New here? Start with CONTRIBUTING.md.
• Architecture overview: ARCHITECTURE.md.
• Testing strategy: TESTING.md.
• Code of Conduct: CODE_OF_CONDUCT.md.
• Security: SECURITY.md.

Bug reports and feature requests → Issues. General questions and discussion → Discussions.

Special Thanks

Sincere thanks to people who made exceptional contributions to the project:

★ StyraxBenzoin - Brilliant feature suggestions, new release testing, community building

See CONTRIBUTORS.md for everyone who has made any kind of contribution to the project.

License

GNU General Public License v3.0. See LICENSE.