Import an Anki Deck

If you already study a language in Anki, you probably know thousands of words that LWT does not know about yet. Importing your deck marks those words as known in one step, instead of you reclassifying each one as you meet it while reading.

Where: Terms → Import an Anki deck, or /vocabulary/anki-deck/import.

This is not the same as Anki Export & Import

Anki Export & Import is a round trip for terms that started life in LWT: export them, study in Anki, import the file back to update them. It matches notes by an lwt- identifier that only LWT-exported files carry.

This page is the opposite direction: a deck you built in Anki, which has no such identifier, imported to create new terms. Feeding an Anki-built deck to the round-trip importer does nothing at all — it finds nothing to match.

Getting the file out of Anki

In Anki: File → Export, choose Anki Deck Package (.apkg), pick the deck, and keep Include scheduling information ticked. The scheduling data is what lets LWT tell an word you have known for a year from one you saw yesterday.

The import in two steps

1. Upload. LWT reads the file and lists the note types it contains, with their field names and note counts.

2. Map. An .apkg records neither a language nor which field means what, so you choose:

Choice	Why LWT has to ask
Note type	A deck can contain several; you may only want one
Term field	Field names are arbitrary — Front, Expression, Word, Vocab…
Translation field	Optional. Pick (none) to import words only
Language	An .apkg does not record one
Word status	Derived from Anki, or one fixed status for everything
Import tags	Anki tags become LWT term tags

How word status is decided

With Derive from Anki (the default), each note's status comes from how well Anki thinks you know it — specifically the card's interval:

In Anki	Becomes in LWT
Suspended	98 — Ignored
Never studied	1 — Learning, level 1
Interval 1–6 days	2
Interval 7–13 days	3
Interval 14–20 days	4
Interval 21+ days	99 — Well known

The 21-day line is Anki's own definition of a mature card, the same threshold its statistics screen uses, so it should match your intuition about the deck.

A note with several cards (forward and reverse, say) is judged by its strongest card: knowing the word in one direction is enough to count. A note only counts as suspended if every one of its cards is suspended.

If that mapping does not suit your deck, choose Give every word the same status instead — useful for a deck you have fully mastered (set everything to Well known) or one you are only starting.

What gets cleaned up

Anki fields are HTML, and real decks lean on it. Before storing a term LWT removes formatting tags, converts <br> and block boundaries to spaces, decodes entities like   and é, drops [sound:…] media references, and keeps the answer out of {{c1::…}} cloze markers. Without that, markup would end up in the reading view and terms would never match the words in your texts.

Importing twice is safe

The importer only ever creates. It never modifies or deletes a term you already have, so re-importing the same deck — or a bigger version of it later — adds only what is genuinely new. Words already in LWT are reported as "already in LWT" and left alone.

Duplicates within one file are collapsed case-insensitively, so forward and reverse notes for the same word produce one term.

Reading the summary

The summary accounts for every note read:

• Terms created — new terms now in your vocabulary
• Already in LWT — the word existed, so it was left untouched
• Skipped (empty term field) — the note had nothing in the chosen field
• Skipped (too long to store) — the term exceeded 250 characters

If everything was skipped as empty, you almost certainly picked the wrong term field. Go back and choose another; nothing was written.

Limits

• Only .apkg files. Anki's newer .colpkg whole-collection format and compressed exports are not supported yet.
• Requires pdo_sqlite, since an .apkg is a zipped SQLite database. See Anki Export & Import.
• No sentences or images. Only the term, its translation and its tags are imported.
• Scheduling is read, not carried over. Anki's intervals decide the starting status, but LWT then schedules the term with its own system — the two do not stay in sync. Live sync is tracked separately and is deliberately deferred.

See also

• Anki Export & Import — the LWT→Anki→LWT round trip
• Term Scores — how LWT schedules reviews afterwards