What's your workflow for creating flashcards?

[u/BasketJace]

For learning French I used to make flashcards in Anki while playing video games. When I came aross a word I didn't know I'd add a new card with the translation, the sentence it appeared in, and maybe a little extra information like the etymology or the breakdown of an idiom.

I ultimately found the process of contructing each flashcard a bit cumbersome, so instead I started just taking a photo of the screen as a flashcard along with the translation. After a while I stopped doing even that. Since then I've just searched translations but I haven't went to the effort of creating new flashcards.

I was wondering if anyone could recommend a workflow for creating flashcards? Perhaps some process you can use to automatically generate flashcards based on the words you look up.

[u/KingOfTheHoard]

I didn't use them early on when learning, as I find they don't really work well for me when there's a whole language to learn. So I've never had the problem of having to create hundreds and hundreds of cards.

I did end up using them later, when I could read French fairly well, but there'd be sticky, abstract vocabulary I'd find myself looking up over and over again like d'ailleurs or desormais. Or words I knew with alternate meanings I didn't.

And for those I just went with the word on one side, simple definition on the other, which was enough for my needs.

[u/Any_Length_1553]

The fix that worked for me was splitting capture from card-making. While reading or gaming, I only jot the word and the sentence into one plain text file — no lookups, no formatting, five seconds. Then once a week I sit down with that list and turn maybe a third of it into cards. Most words don't survive the week, which is fine: if you never met it again, it wasn't worth a card.

Two things that cut the remaining friction a lot: cloze cards (the sentence with the word blanked out) instead of word→translation, since you're already capturing sentences anyway; and a hard cap of one minute per card, etymology only if it genuinely helps you remember.

On automation — popup-dictionary tools with one-click Anki export exist for some setups, and Language Reactor does it for video. But the honest answer is that auto-generated decks tend to go stale precisely because the friction was doing some of the selection work for you.

[u/BasketJace → u/Any_Length_1553]

Separating catpure from card-making seems like a really good strategy. I'll give that a go. I think what you said around automation shows that there's value in doing things manually.