Guides
YouTube Summary to Anki
There is no Anki export. There is also not much to export — getting cards in is a two-column paste, and the work is deciding what the cards say.
No integration, no deck download, no plugin. What there is: summaries and structured notes, and Anki's import, which takes plain text and is easier than most people expect.
This page is the mechanical half — how to get material in cleanly. The question of whether cards should be generated at all is its own argument, and the short version is that writing the question is where the learning is.
What Anki actually wants
A plain text file, one card per line, with the front and back separated by a consistent character. Tab is the usual choice because it rarely appears inside a card.
That is the entire format, and Anki's own documentation on importing text files sets out the details. No special export is needed from anything, which is why no tool really needs an Anki integration — a two-column list is already a deck.
| Front | Back |
|---|---|
| Why use a proton gradient rather than making ATP directly? | It stores energy across the membrane so synthesis can be coupled to controlled flow — 14:20 |
| What breaks when the middleware runs before the session attaches? | The request has no user, so the auth check passes on an empty object — 31:05 |
Note the timestamps on the back. They cost nothing and they solve the failure every deck eventually has.
The timestamp habit
Worth its own section because almost nobody does it and it is the difference between a deck that survives and one you abandon.
In two months you will hit a card you no longer understand. The answer will be words you once wrote and no longer have the context for. At that point most people delete the card, which loses whatever it was protecting.
A timestamp on the back turns that into a ten-second fix: open the video at that moment, hear the lecturer explain it, and carry on. The card survives and so does the understanding.
This is the same reason summaries carry timestamps at all — a claim you cannot check is a claim you will eventually stop trusting.
The routine
- Generate notes for the lecture and keep them open.
- Read a section, close it, and write the question you could not answer. In a plain text file, front, tab, back.
- Put the timestamp at the end of the back.
- Stop at fifteen cards. A deck you review beats a deck that is complete.
- In Anki, File → Import, pick the file, set the separator to tab, choose the deck, import.
- Review the first few immediately to catch cards that made sense while writing and do not now.
Two minutes of that is mechanics. The twenty minutes in step two is the studying, and there is no version of this where a tool does it for you and you still get the benefit.
What not to import
Three things that produce decks people quietly abandon.
Whole summary sections as cards. A card with a paragraph on the back is a re-reading exercise wearing a flashcard costume. If you cannot say the answer aloud in a sentence, it is not a card yet.
Anything you have not verified. A summary is a paraphrase of an automatic transcript. A misheard figure imported into a spaced-repetition system is a wrong fact you have arranged to memorise on a schedule — which is worse than never having made the card.
Everything the lecture covered. Comprehensiveness is the enemy of review. Fifteen cards you see every day beat eighty you stop opening in week three.
Where the video's limits show up
Cards made from a caption track inherit everything the caption track lacks, and on technical subjects that is a lot.
Nothing drawn on a board is in the transcript. Nothing shown on a slide is in the transcript. So a deck built purely from a lecture summary will cover the narration and silently omit the derivations, diagrams and worked examples — which on a maths or chemistry course is most of the assessable material.
The fix is not a better tool. It is adding those cards yourself from the slides, which is the same gap generated lecture notes have.
Decks that survive, and decks that do not
Most abandoned decks fail for the same three reasons, and all of them are decisions made while writing rather than problems with the software.
Too many cards. A deck grows until the daily review is a chore, and then it stops happening. Fifteen cards a lecture is sustainable across a term; fifty is not, and a deck you have stopped opening is worth nothing however complete it was.
Cards that test recognition. If you can answer by remembering the shape of the sentence, the card is not doing the work — and a deck full of those produces a strong feeling of knowing the material and no ability to use it.
No route back to the source. The timestamp habit again. A card you cannot reconstruct is a card you delete, and enough deletions turn a deck into a record of what you gave up on.
None of that is specific to cards made from video. Video adds one thing: the transcript can be wrong, so a card can be confidently and repeatedly wrong in a way a card from a textbook usually is not.
One card type, to start with
Anki supports several note types and it is tempting to set up a scheme before writing anything. Resist that for the first term.
Basic — a front and a back — covers nearly everything, and cloze deletion covers most of the rest. A two-column text file imports into Basic with no configuration at all, which means you can go from a lecture to a working deck in one sitting.
Elaborate note types with several fields are a project in themselves, and they are the most common way a deck ends up designed but never written.
Frequently asked questions
Is there an Anki export?
No. None is really needed — Anki imports plain text with a tab between front and back, so a two-column list is already a deck. The work is writing the cards, not moving them.
How do I import the file?
File → Import in Anki, choose the text file, set the field separator to tab, pick the deck and import. Review a few immediately to catch cards that made sense while writing and do not now.
Should I put timestamps on the cards?
Yes, on the back. When a card stops making sense in two months, the timestamp turns "delete this" into ten seconds of listening to the lecturer explain it again.
Can I import a whole summary as cards?
You can, and it produces a deck you will abandon. A card with a paragraph on the back is re-reading rather than retrieval, and unverified paraphrase imported into spaced repetition is a wrong fact scheduled for memorisation.
Two minutes of mechanics, twenty of thinking
Generate the notes, write fifteen real questions, and put the timestamps on the back.
Generate notes — free
