Brinsley — Article to Flashcards by Brinsley

Turn an article your class is already reading into a vocabulary deck, in about ten seconds.

Choosing the words by hand, scrolling back to find the sentence each one appeared in, and typing both into a spreadsheet is an evening's work. Brinsley does it while you wait.

Highlight the passage. Click the icon. Brinsley picks out the words worth teaching and pairs each one with the sentence it appeared in — word for word from your article, not a dictionary example. Untick anything you don't want, and save the deck.

WHAT YOU GET
• The words worth teaching, chosen by how common a word is rather than how long it is
• Each word's own sentence, taken word for word from the text your class read
• A level estimate on every card, written ~B1, ~B2 and so on
• A review table, so you decide what makes the deck
• A .csv built for Anki, tagged with the article it came from

WHY THE SENTENCE MATTERS
A definition tells a student what a word means. The sentence tells them how it is used — in the piece they just read, in the register the writer chose. That is the laborious part to collect by hand, and it is the part Brinsley exists to do.

PERMISSION WARNING
Depending on your browser, you may be told that Brinsley can "read and change your data on the sites you visit". That is accurate about the mechanism and misleading about the use, so here is exactly what happens:

• It runs only when you click the icon. It declares no content script, so nothing happens on page load.
• It reads only the tab in front of you, and only the passage you highlighted.
• It holds no storage permission, so the browser hands it no storage interface of its own. What you highlight is never stored anywhere else either; it is held while the panel is open, and written only to the file you save.
• It makes no network request. There is no server to speak to, no account to hold, and no key to surrender.

Brinsley holds two permissions — activeTab and scripting — and no host permissions at all.

NO DATA IS COLLECTED
Not anonymised, not aggregated, not "to improve the service". There is nowhere for it to go.

WHAT IT DOES NOT DO
• English only, for now.
• The level shown is an estimate from word frequency, not a CEFR measurement. That is why it is written ~B2 and never B2.
• It reads the page you are on. If it cannot reach a page, it says so plainly rather than asking you to reload.

Version 0.1.1 is free. No account, no sign-in.