Recently I wanted to watch the TV series Friends, and it suddenly occurred to me that it’s a good chance to learn English. So I found some tools to assist me. This article is a recording of the ways I build up the learning workflow (using Anki, MPV, mpvacious, and Yomitan).

Preparation

Installing Anki and the add-on

Anki is a very powerful tool that can help remember things, you can download the installer here.

In order to create flash cards automatically, we should also download the AnkiConnect. Just open Anki, go to the Tools->Add-ons menu item, then click on Get Add-ons and paste in 2055492159.

Installing MPV

MPV is an open-source media player, you can find how to install MPV from here.

Installing mpvacious

Since MPV is an open-source player, there are a lot of extensions to fulfill our customized requirements. The mpvacious is one of them, it can create Anki cards while watching videos.

The installation is quite straightforward, just using git to clone the repo.

For MacOS and Linux:

mkdir -p ~/.config/mpv/scripts/
git clone 'https://github.com/Ajatt-Tools/mpvacious.git' ~/.config/mpv/scripts/subs2srs

For Windows:

mkdir %APPDATA%/mpv/scripts/
git clone 'https://github.com/Ajatt-Tools/mpvacious.git' %APPDATA%/mpv/scripts/

Installing Yomitan

Yomitan is a browser extension which provides a pop-up window to show the word’s meaning. It can automatically create Anki cards too. You can download the extension for your browser here.

Configuration

The default configuration for mpvacious and Yomitan are for Japanese, so we need to do some personal configuration.

BTW, MPV has a lot of parameters that can be customized, but for now the default is enough.

For mpvacious, we need to create a config file to control the configuration. For MacOS and Linux, the file should be located in ~/.config/mpv/script-opts/subs2srs.conf, for Windows, it is %APPDATA%/mpv/script-opts/subs2srs.conf.

deck_name=Learning

model_name=English Subtitles

sentence_field=SentEng
audio_field=SentAudio
image_field=Image

Please note that you need to create a deck named “Learning” and an “English Subtitles” model to let them create Anki cards.

The Yomitan has the setting UI, just notice to download the dictionary and fill in the customized Anki Cards parameters.

![image-20250322195422459](/Users/chengbinghan/Library/Application Support/typora-user-images/image-20250322195422459.png)

In order to smooth the workflow, background clipboard text monitoring is recommended. Just remember to open the copy to clipboard option when playing the video.