Export a ready-to-study Anki deck, screenshot and all
If you already make your own cards, you know the question that decides whether a tool is worth it: not can I export, but what comes out. A word in a spreadsheet you still have to shape into a card? Or a card you can actually sit down and study?
Playto now exports the second kind. Save lines while you play, and you can pull them out as a finished Anki deck — a .apkg file you double-click to import, where each card already looks like a card.
What’s on the card
The front is the scene and the line, with nothing revealed yet:
The screenshot of the moment you met the line, and the sentence above it with furigana over the kanji. You read it, try to recall what it meant, then reveal.
The back adds the meaning:
The same scene, now with the meaning shown, and you grade yourself the usual Anki way. Three things ride onto every card: the screenshot, the sentence you actually read, and its meaning — the context you’d otherwise be pasting together by hand.
A deck, not a spreadsheet
The earlier way to get words out of Playto was a TSV export — a table of word, definition, and sentence that you map onto your own note type. That’s still there, and it’s the right tool when you only want to top up a deck you already keep.
The .apkg is the other end of that. It’s a complete deck: the note type, the cards, and the screenshots bundled inside one file. You double-click it, Anki imports it, and the cards are ready — no field mapping, no separate image folder to wrangle. And because the media rides along, the deck stands on its own: it studies the same in Anki on your desktop or your phone, with or without Playto running. The cards are yours to keep.
Why the screenshot earns its place
A line is easier to recall in the scene where you met it than stripped down to text on a blank card. The picture gives memory more to hold onto — the face, the place, where you were in the story — and when it comes back, the words tend to come with it. It’s the same reason Album Replay keeps the scene attached; the exported deck carries that idea into the review you already do every morning.
What to keep, and what to check
Two things about the cards themselves. The furigana and the meaning are generated — they’re good, but a long or context-poor line is a hint rather than a verdict. If a reading or a translation looks off, you can fix it yourself — edit the line in Playto before you export, or the card in Anki afterward — so it’s right for the months you’ll be seeing it. And keep less than you feel like keeping: the failure mode of mining isn’t too few cards, it’s two hundred half-interesting ones you never open. Export the lines that actually stopped you.
You don’t have to leave Playto to review
Anki export is for people who already live in a deck. If you don’t, you don’t need it — the same saved lines feed Practice with built-in spaced repetition, and Album Replay reviews a line in its scene without exporting anything at all. The deck is an outlet for the Anki crowd, not a step everyone has to take.
Getting started
The saving happens while you play — see sentence mining from games for the capture loop, and from reading to remembering for deciding what’s worth keeping. Once you’ve got a session’s worth of lines, export the deck and it lands in Anki looking like something you’d otherwise have spent an evening building by hand. The .apkg export is part of the full version, not the free demo — but the free demo lets you try the capture-and-save loop on your own games first.