Automate vocabulary capture before you build the flashcards

When learning a new language, one problem is that some very repetitive work has to be done by hand, such as creating vocabulary cards. Memorisation is already tedious enough, so it's a good idea to figure out how to automate the vocabulary capture itself. Today I've been thinking that you can capture new words in a Google Spreadsheet, but the same can be implemented in Obsidian as well. Since Obsidian reads its files from a regular local folder of .md files, you can point your automation at the files themselves rather than at Obsidian. For my Spanish study so far, I have been using a Google Sheet with an Apps Script and two columns, the original word and its English translation. The script periodically checks for anything I've added, picks it up, and puts it into my vocabulary collection. The spreadsheet works well because I can insert Google Translate formulas into it, which translate everything automatically before the import. With languages that don't use Latin characters, you might also need romanisation, which would take a different formula in Google Sheets, probably a lookup. Another good thing is that a spreadsheet has no limit on how much you can add at once, because the script reads all the non-empty rows and turns them into separate cards. In the Obsidian implementation, you would probably keep one empty .md file that serves as a template. You fill it with a new vocabulary entry; the script checks whether the note has been filled, duplicates it into your collection, and cleans the template so it's ready for the next intake. You can also consider pushing these into Anki cards for easy review, and you can use AI to write the Python script, to save time on building the automation itself. Current models are good at writing and maintaining this kind of Python, even the cheap ones. Paying a little for a model can beat learning Python yourself. The same model could wire up the Anki API so the notes land straight in your card templates. In Anki it's also easy to add pronunciation and images, which helps me with Spanish vocabulary quite a bit. Off to press, such as it is, Zhenia