oakmachine / projects / anki-castellano

2026-04-24

I'm making Anki flashcards to study Castellano. I've updated the card format over time, in the latest version each target word that I'm trying to learn gets up to four associated cards:

Type One: translate the English word to Castellano:

"the capacity limit" -> "aforo"

Type Two: identify the Castellano word from an image:

báscula

Type Three: fill in a missing word in a Castellano sentence (cloze):

devolución

Type Four: translate a full Castellano sentence (with audio):

The pipeline to generate the assets and ultimately a full anki deck:

  1. An LLM generates a Castellano wordlist based on a topic.

In the prompt I hardcode for intermediate difficulty -- so words more like "cliff" and less like "house." The LLM is also prompted to create sentences for the word and the translation to English using a mix of grammar and verb conjugations. I'm using the latest and greatest gemini pro for this, and that's pretty inexpensive.

  1. I create corresponding images for each word using another LLM call.

The prompt for this was another piece generated in the previous text-only call. This is relatively expensive, single digit cents per image. I use gemini as well. The images are optional but very fun to include. To save a little money I batch four prompts into a 2x2 grid and then split the result into four separate images with PIL.

  1. I similarly generate audio using gemini TTS which handles the pronunciation very well

  2. Another small script creates the Anki deck itself.

For now I'm just making entire new decks when I want to add cards to my study practice.

More example cards from early deck-building:

puá

reflejo

I'm adding decks to ankiweb:

And the code for all this: github.com/yosemitebandit/anki-castellano

Would be cool if..