[imtringued]

I'm not sure if you care, but one of my biggest issues with Anki is that in theory there should be high quality official vocabulary decks and if you want to make a custom deck, all you really should have to do is select the words you want in your deck.

One of the worst parts about learning vocabulary with Anki isn't with the spaced repetition but rather the mechanism that adds new cards to your pool of "learning" cards. You might be grinding 10 to 30 words per day, but the ones you actually need are so far spaced out that 90% of the time is being wasted with poor retention, because you don't know or care about the context those words are used in. This means learning a language is an X year slog that you must get through "all or nothing" instead of being milestone driven.

Anki needs to become vocabulary aware so that you learn words and concepts instead of cards. Then an LLM driven add-on could automatically filter down the base deck based on whether the word is relevant to the PDF or picture you provide.

Most language learning tools are crap because they don't adapt to your particular goals and needs. I have personally built something similar that takes a video and just cuts out the subtitles, a thumbnail/snapshot and the audio track to generate anki decks of a video file and since it only takes a month at most to get through the entire deck, most of the pain is actually in finding novel video files rather than using Anki.