An Anki plugin that imports review history for words studied in JPDB. Currently working as of Anki 2.60.0.
This plugin imports the following information:
- Japanese spelling (e.g. 言葉)
- Japanese reading (e.g. ことば)
- Review history, accomplished by simulating the same button answer responses in Anki.
There's also an experimental option to scrape your existing cards in JPDB for more information that can be enabled in the setup window. This allows importing:
- Card definitions
- Custom sentence
- Notes
- Composed-of kanji (each kanji and its meaning, one per line)
- Example sentences
When scraping is enabled you can also import example sentences. In the setup window, pick the Anki field the examples should go into and choose how many sentences to import (0–5, where 0 disables example import).
A few things to keep in mind:
- Only the example sentences that are already visible on a word's JPDB page are imported. JPDB hides most of its examples behind a "N more..." link that loads them on demand, and those are not scraped. This means the count you choose is best-effort: if you ask for 5 but only 1 is visible, you'll get 1.
- This is not your custom/chosen sentence — that is imported separately via the "Custom sentence" field. Example sentences come from JPDB's "Examples" section (or, when that section is absent, the "Monolingual examples" section).
- Sentences are formatted with Anki ruby/furigana syntax (e.g.
確[かく]認[にん]), with the Japanese sentence and its English translation (when present) on separate lines, and a blank line between sentences.
This plugin does not import audio or pitch accent, but see the "Recommended Additional Plugins" section for some tips on plugins that can generate these for you!
Importing a large collection (for example ~13k words with several years of review history) can take a while, especially with scraping enabled. To make this practical:
- Scraping runs concurrently across a small thread pool, so throughput is bounded by JPDB's response time rather than a single in-flight request. The request rate is capped at 100 requests/second to stay polite.
- Progress is checkpointed to a temporary file as each word is imported. If the import errors out or you cancel it, just run "Import from JPDB" again with the same review file and it will resume from where it left off (already-imported words are skipped). The checkpoint file lives in your OS temp directory and is removed automatically once an import completes successfully.
- Download your JPDB review history by going to the settings page and clicking "Export vocabulary reviews (.json)" near the bottom of the page.
- Create a new Anki deck where you want to import your JPDB cards.
- After installing this add-on, in Anki, go to "Tools" => "Import from JPDB"
- Follow the instructions in the setup window.
This project uses uv for dependency management. After cloning, run uv sync to create the virtual environment and install dependencies.
To build the package, run uv run build.py in the command line which will generate the add-on file jpdb_anki_import.ankiaddon.
To test the file in Anki, perform the following steps:
- Open Anki and click on "Tools" in the top menu bar.
- Select "Add-ons" from the dropdown menu.
- Click on "Install from file..."
- Navigate to the directory where the jpdb_anki_import.ankiaddon file was generated, and select it.
- Click "Open" to install the addon.
- Restart Anki if prompted to do so.
The following other Anki plugins can help flesh out cards created after the import to add translation and more detail:
- Automatic Japanese Dictionary Lookup adds English definitions for Japanese words
- Japanese Example Sentences adds example Japanese sentences.
- AwesomeTTS adds Japanese audio for words.
- Japanese Pitch Accent adds pitch accent diagrams.