I've watched hundreds of episodes of anime and learned maybe six words. So I built this.

I've been learning Japanese for a couple of years, and the thing that never worked for me was flashcards. "世界 = world" is a fact I can memorise and still not recognise when someone actually says it. So I built Animei. You watch an episode with Japanese subtitles, click a word you don't know, and get the reading, the meaning and its JLPT level. Save it, and the card keeps a clip of the exact line — same voice, same scene. Reviews are spaced repetition, but the prompt is the moment you met the word, not a dictionary entry. Free, no signup (words live in your browser until you decide to make an account), works on phone as a PWA, and reviews work offline. Built solo over about a year: vanilla JS front, Node + SQLite back, one small VPS. The hardest parts were nothing to do with the UI — Japanese tokenization (MeCab gives you morphemes, not the words a learner wants) and subtitle timing (community subtitle files are almost never in sync with the video, so there's an automatic alignment step). Would love feedback on the first 30 seconds especially: does it explain itself without me standing next to you?