Brinsley — Vocabulary Flashcards for Anki

Point Brinsley at an article your class is already reading, and it picks out the words worth teaching — each one marked with an estimated level, and carrying the sentence it appeared in.

Reading a text twice to find those words, scrolling back for 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 chooses the words worth teaching, marks how hard each one is, and pairs it 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.

WHO IT IS FOR Teachers, students, and individual learners. ESL, EFL and ESOL classrooms, and anyone building a vocabulary out of what they read.

WHAT YOU GET • A level estimate on every card, written ~B2, ~C1 and so on • 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 review table, so you decide what makes the deck • A second view for the words it passed over, grouped by the reason it passed over them • 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.

WHAT PRO ADDS Pro is optional. Everything described above is in the free version and stays there.

• The word in bold inside its own sentence • Fill-in-the-blank cards — the sentence with the word blanked out, for Anki's Cloze note type • Your own deck tag, so a term's lessons can share one: "Year 9 Autumn" across six articles is one search in Anki, where six article names are six searches • A stricter filter for young learners, or no filter at all for adult and advanced classes. Slurs and obscenity are filtered in every copy, paid or not • Your own list of words that never become cards

A licence key unlocks it, on the settings page.

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; it is held while the panel is open, and written only to the file you save. The settings you choose, and your licence key if you have one, are saved in your own browser and go nowhere else. • 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.

Brinsley 1.3.1 is free to use. Pro is optional, and the free version keeps everything it has always had. No account, no sign-in, either way.