Why

Anki is powerful but starts empty, and you build every deck yourself. Most other apps want an account, a subscription or your data. Ordkort gives you ready word lists for 29 topics and levels A1–C1 with the same FSRS scheduler that Anki offers, plus a dictionary, a grammar book and a translator that explains every word. AI writes the cards, and they are checked against real dictionaries: the official Norwegian dictionaries at ordbokene.no, and Wiktionary for other languages. Everything stays in your browser; devices sync without an account, end-to-end encrypted.

Features

Ordkort is a lightweight site for learning almost any language from almost any other one:

• Flashcards by topic with spaced repetition (FSRS-4.5) — “I know / I don’t know” for new words, “I remember / I forgot” for reviews. Tap to flip, swipe, keyboard shortcuts, text-to-speech. Five more study modes: multiple choice, typing (with an on-screen row of special letters; one typo or pinyin/romaji for a non-Latin script still count, the right word in another form is half-right: not a mistake, but the card comes back), listening, fill-the-gap in the example sentence, or a mix. Pinyin, romaji and other romanizations stay off the front of a card (one tap shows them), so the characters themselves are read. Each language has its own limit of new words a day, and the language switcher shows how many reviews wait in each.
• Topics: 29 built-in topics in 6 groups (first steps, people, everyday life, the world around, work & society, grammar sets), any custom topic, or an empty deck for your own words. AI picks real, frequent words for levels A1–C1; “+20 words” keeps extending a deck without repeats.
• Dictionary in the spirit of ordbokene.no and Lexin: translation, inflection tables, meanings with examples, fixed expressions, compounds. For Norwegian, the official Bokmål/Nynorsk dictionary data is shown alongside and used as ground truth for the AI entry, and every AI-written noun and verb card is checked against it once: a wrong article or wrong forms are fixed (in the shared word bank for everyone, and in cards saved earlier by a background check in the browser). For other languages the server checks nouns and verbs against Wiktionary the same way: the article must fit the noun's gender ("die Hund" → "der Hund"), a gender is confirmed where the word does not show it ("книга"), and forms Wiktionary has never heard of are dropped. The dictionary page for these languages shows the Wiktionary entry next to the AI one (gender, key forms, pronunciation, senses with short examples, origin; explanations in English), uses it as ground truth for the AI entry, and links to the main dictionaries of the language (RAE, Duden, Larousse, Treccani, Jisho…). Translations still come from the AI alone.
• Grammar book: 15 chapters by part of speech (nouns, adjectives, verbs, word order…) with tables, examples, typical mistakes and exercises, plus free-form grammar questions.
• Translator with explanations: every word colour-coded by part of speech, with its form and the rule that explains why it is used exactly there.
• Reading: paste any text; words are coloured as new / learning / known, tap one to see its meaning in that context and add it to your cards.
• Statistics and a daily goal: streak, reviews over 30 days, a 14-day forecast, words by stage, the words you forget most.
• Anki both ways: import an .apkg from any Anki (the current format too) with its pictures, its recordings (the speaker button then plays the card's own audio) and, if you want, its progress; export your decks as an .apkg Anki opens, with progress (FSRS memory state included), pictures and recordings. CSV in and out, and sharing a deck by link or QR code — only the words, never your progress.
• A voice for every card: a card without a recording of its own plays a native speaker's recording from Wiktionary (Lingua Libre and others on Wikimedia Commons) or, with a GOOGLE_TTS_KEY, a synthetic voice within a daily budget of characters; each word is fetched once for everybody. The device's voice remains a choice in Settings.
• Fitted to your memory: Settings → Fit to my memory finds the FSRS weights from your own answers on the device (learnt on the earlier answers, kept only when they predict the later ones better than the defaults).
• A library of decks: publish a deck for everybody learning the same pair of languages (Deck → ⋯ → Publish in the library), find others' by title, sort by the best or the newest, vote and add. Before a deck is listed, a model told the library's policy reads its words and one that sees pictures looks at its cover; an unsafe deck is refused, and nothing is published while the check cannot run. Three people's reports hide a deck until the site's owner looks; the publisher can take it down.
• Cards with gaps and fields of your own: mark a gap as in Anki (Jeg {{bor}} i Oslo, {{c1::bor::verb}}) and the card is studied as a gap; any card can carry up to eight named fields. Anki cloze notes and a note's other fields come in this way and go back out to Anki.
• Phrases for situations: ready situations (pharmacy, café, doctor, job interview…) or one of your own give a deck of what is said and heard there, each phrase with the line that answers it.
• Reminders that stay on the device: after an hour you choose, on a day without study, a notification says how many cards are due — from the open tab, or from the service worker when the site is installed as an app. There is no push service: the plan lives in the browser's cache.
• Covers for topics and a look on a phone: a new deck of a ready topic gets a free picture as its cover, and Settings → Appearance shows the site at a phone's width wearing the look being edited.
• Empty fields filled in: an imported deck without examples or grammar, or with a translation that is not one, is completed by the AI 20 cards per request (one of the day's AI requests); words the shared bank already has cost nothing, and only empty fields change. A big deck asks first, and can be filled 10 words a day instead.
• Pictures on cards: a free, openly licensed picture found by the word, one of your own, or a pasted one; kept on the device. The word is looked up in Wikidata in its own language, so "hus" finds the Wikimedia Commons picture of a house before Pixabay's (when a PIXABAY_KEY is set) and Openverse's, which is searched in English.
• Deck covers: a small square picture instead of a deck's emoji (tap the emoji): found by the topic, your own, or pasted. It is kept in the deck as a 128-px JPEG, so it syncs and goes with the deck when you share it; an AI can give one through MCP (cover_url).
• Your own look: a card template in HTML and CSS ({{term}}, {{image}}, {{#example}}…{{/example}}…) with ready ones to start from and a live preview, and CSS for the whole site. Scripts never run.
• Remembering better: two answers or four (Again / Hard / Good / Easy), your own target retention, words you keep forgetting set aside, and What goes wrong: your answers read back as findings, each with one thing to do.
• Your own AI, through MCP: connect Claude, ChatGPT or any MCP client to https://ordkort.com/mcp and ask it for a deck with pictures or a look for your cards; it answers with a link that adds it (see MCP).
• Works offline: a service worker keeps the site, so cards open without a connection. After a deploy the app notices the new version by itself — also when it is installed on a phone and only woken up — and loads it at the next move to another screen.
• Report a mistake on any AI entry; after independent reports it is regenerated for everyone.
• 60 languages to learn and explain in. The interface is hand-translated into English, Russian, Ukrainian, Norwegian, Arabic (RTL) and Chinese; other interface languages are translated once by AI and shared.

MCP

Ordkort is also an MCP server, so your own AI can make decks and looks for it. Address: https://ordkort.com/mcp (Streamable HTTP; no account, no key). It is in the official MCP Registry as com.ordkort/ordkort.

• Claude (claude.ai, desktop): Settings → Connectors → Add custom connector → paste the address.
• Claude Code: claude mcp add --transport http ordkort https://ordkort.com/mcp
• ChatGPT: Settings → Apps & Connectors → Create (developer mode) → paste the address.
• Others (Cursor, VS Code, LM Studio…): add a remote / HTTP MCP server with the address.

The address, these steps and example requests are also in the app, under Settings → Your own AI (MCP).

Then ask, for example: “Make me an A2 Norwegian deck about the kitchen with pictures” or “Design a dark, calm card with the picture on top”. The AI gets a link; opening it shows the deck or the look and adds it only when you agree. It never sees or changes your cards.

Tool	What it does
list_languages	The 60 languages and their codes
list_topics	The built-in topics and their ids
ready_words	Words from the shared bank for a topic and level, checked against dictionaries
find_pictures	Free pictures for a word in its language: the Wikidata item's Commons picture first, then Pixabay's and Openverse's, with their credits
design_guide	Everything an AI needs to restyle the site: how a look is applied and cleaned, the card's structure, fields, pictures, fonts, every CSS variable, the parts of each screen (with body classes per screen), light and dark themes, what not to do, a whole example and a checklist
create_deck	A deck of up to 500 cards, pictures and a cover by URL included → a link that adds it
create_design	A card template in HTML/CSS and site CSS → a link that shows it, lets you try it on the whole site, and applies it; notes back what will not work as meant

Scripts in a design never run. Pictures a design names by https address (a background photo, say) are fetched once through the site's picture proxy, all at once, so CSS cannot report what is on the page; the card's own picture is <img src="https://raw.githubusercontent.com/silicq/ordkort/main/{{image}}"> or var(--card-image). The AI is asked to end its answer with "Powered by ordkort.com". Calls count against an hourly limit per client.

Architecture

public/            the site: HTML, CSS, JS, fonts — served by Cloudflare as static assets
  _headers         security headers (CSP etc.)
  sw.js            service worker for offline use
  js/build.js      the version of the site, written at every deploy (not in git)
  js/bundle.js     all the scripts of the app in one minified file, written at every deploy (not in git)
src/               Cloudflare Worker — runs only for /api/*
  worker.js        routing and same-origin check
  api.js           AI requests: shared cache → word bank → limits → Groq
  prompts.js       all prompts and validation of AI output
  facts.js         verified Norwegian Bokmål grammar facts used to ground the AI
  wiktionary.js    Wiktionary for other languages: checks cards, and the entry shown in the dictionary
  groq.js          Groq client with model fallback
  limits.js        burst, hourly, daily and site-wide limits
  warm.js          a base of ready decks: every 15 minutes, while the site is quiet, the cron fills one more
                   group of the shared word bank, from the decks used most to the rarer ones
  sync.js          device sync and one-time codes (the server only ever sees ciphertext)
  db.js            D1: the schema is created automatically on the first request
scripts/build.mjs  writes public/js/bundle.js (the scripts listed in scripts/bundle.mjs, minified by esbuild)
                   and public/js/build.js; wrangler runs it before every deploy and `wrangler dev`
scripts/landing.mjs  plain pages about the site for search engines (public/<lang>/, 6 languages)
scripts/seo-pages.mjs  static Norwegian pages for search engines, in English, Russian, Ukrainian and Norwegian:
                   29 topic word lists (/<ui>/<learn>/<topic>/), ~530 dictionary entries (/<ui>/ordbok/nb/<word>/),
                   two hubs and a page for teachers per language (texts in scripts/teachers-text.mjs),
                   the pages above and sitemap.xml. Content in data/seo/ (see its README);
                   run `npm run seo` after changing it (a test checks the files are up to date)
data/seo/          the words, translations and examples of those pages, official forms from Bokmålsordboka
tests/             node:test suites (see below)
wrangler.jsonc     Cloudflare configuration

User data — cards, progress, settings — lives in the browser’s localStorage; the history of every answer (what “What goes wrong” reads) and pictures and recordings for cards live in its IndexedDB. The history stays on that device; a picture found on the web is fetched again by each device, and photos of your own and recordings from Anki reach linked devices file by file, encrypted like the rest. Only AI requests (a word, a topic or a text plus the language pair) reach the server, plus decks you choose to share by link (kept for a year) and anonymous mistake reports (kept for 30 days). Answers are stored in a shared base, so the next person gets them instantly and without using their limit.

The Groq key lives only in the Worker secret. The browser sends parameters, not prompts, so the API can’t be used as someone else’s free chatbot.

Limits (change them in wrangler.jsonc → vars or in the Cloudflare dashboard): AI_PER_HOUR = 40 and AI_PER_DAY = 120 per person, AI_DAILY_BUDGET = 2500 for the whole site. A person is identified by a hash of the IP address with a salt that changes every day; the IP itself is never stored.

What the AI can carry. Groq's free plan gives each of the three models 200,000 tokens in any 24 hours. A list of words takes 5,000–7,000 tokens, a dictionary entry or a translation a few thousand, so the whole site gets about 100–150 new AI answers a day; everything already generated (the shared cache and word bank) costs nothing. That is why the bank of ready decks matters: the cron fills it slowly (WARM_PER_DAY, 24 lists a day, about a fifth of the capacity), and npm run warm stops after 25 lists. A paid Groq plan lifts the limit.

Sync without accounts. A random 32-byte secret exists only on the user’s devices. It derives the copy’s id, a write token and an AES-256-GCM key. The server stores ciphertext and a hash of the token. Devices are linked with a one-time 16-character code (valid for 3 minutes, burnt on first read) or a QR link whose key part sits after # and is never sent to the server. A one-time transfer without cloud storage is also available. A 54-character recovery key restores the encrypted copy if the browser data is wiped on every device. The copy holds only the names of photos of your own and of recordings from Anki: each file goes to /api/media on its own, encrypted with the same key (at most 5,000 files and about 110 MB per copy), and a device fetches the ones its cards need. They are deleted with the copy.

Users can read all of this in plain words on the site’s “How it works” page (#/about).

Keeping data safe

• Clearing the browser cache does not touch the cards; clearing site data / cookies does.
• Safari on iPhone and iPad deletes the data of sites not opened for 7 days — unless the site is added to the Home Screen. The site is installable (web app manifest) and explains this in Settings.
• The site asks the browser for persistent storage, so data isn’t evicted when disk space runs low.
• Insurance: sync with a saved recovery key, or a JSON backup file (Settings → Data).

Run locally

npm install

Copy .dev.vars.example to .dev.vars and put your Groq key into it, then:

npm run dev

The site runs at http://localhost:8787 together with a local D1 database.

Tests

npm test

The suites cover FSRS scheduling, merging data between devices (edits, deletions, daily stats), sync encryption and recovery keys, QR codes (decoded by an independent reader), CSV import/export, completeness of the interface translations, the offline file list, the Worker API end to end (shared decks, one-time link codes, versioned sync) in Wrangler’s local runtime, and the static pages for search engines: up to date, unique titles and canonicals, reciprocal hreflang, no broken links, every page in the sitemap, at least 150 words of its own on each. No AI calls are made. GitHub Actions runs them on every push and pull request.

Deploy to Cloudflare with automatic updates from GitHub

1. Cloudflare dashboard → Workers & Pages → Create → Import a repository → pick this repository. Leave the build command empty; the deploy command is npx wrangler deploy.
2. After the first deploy: Worker → Settings → Variables and Secrets → add the secret GROQ_API_KEY (and optionally IP_SALT, any long random string, and PIXABAY_KEY, a free Pixabay API key that adds Pixabay to the picture search, and GOOGLE_TTS_KEY, a Google Cloud Text-to-Speech key for a synthetic voice on cards with no recording, and ADMIN_TOKEN, a long random string that lets the site's owner take down any deck in the library or shared by link).
3. The D1 database ordkort is created automatically on the first deploy, its tables on the first request.

From then on every push to main is deployed automatically.

The same from a terminal:

npx wrangler login

npx wrangler secret put GROQ_API_KEY

npx wrangler secret put PIXABAY_KEY   # optional

npx wrangler secret put ADMIN_TOKEN   # optional: taking down decks

Taking a deck down, and the decks hidden by reports:

curl -X DELETE -H "X-Admin-Token: $ADMIN_TOKEN" https://YOUR-SITE/api/library/DECKID   # or /api/share/DECKID
curl -H "X-Admin-Token: $ADMIN_TOKEN" https://YOUR-SITE/api/library/hidden

npm run deploy

Security

• All input is validated on the server (language whitelist, length limits); AI output is checked for shape and size before it enters the shared base.
• Cross-site requests are rejected (Origin check); the API accepts JSON only.
• Bursts are cut in memory, generations are counted in D1, plus a site-wide daily budget.
• Room in the database: sync copies and their files, link codes, shared and library decks, looks and voices take their bytes from a daily allowance, STORE_PER_DAY_MB = 100 per person and STORE_SITE_DAY_MB = 1000 for the whole site, so a script cannot fill D1 in an hour. Request bodies and fetched pictures and recordings are read as streams and cut off at their limit.
• The library's check counts its requests to the moderating models (GUARD_PER_DAY = 60 per person, GUARD_SITE_DAY = 400 for the site), so publishing big decks cannot spend Groq's daily tokens for everybody. The models are told that a deck's text is data, and that a deck asking to be called safe is not.
• What the browser sends as words it already has goes into the prompt only when it looks like words (or short phrases), as a JSON list: nobody can write instructions for the AI into the shared word bank.
• A look someone shares is previewed with its CSS scoped to the sample cards; it reaches the rest of the site only after “Use this look”. If a look ever hides the controls, open the site with ?nolook (https://ordkort.com/?nolook#/settings) and reset it.
• The CSP forbids third-party scripts and framing; fonts are self-hosted. WebAssembly is allowed ('wasm-unsafe-eval') only for SQLite, which reads and writes Anki packages and loads from the site itself the first time someone imports or exports. The only third-party request from the browser is the open ordbokene.no API for Norwegian. The server looks words up in Wiktionary (only the word, with a User-Agent as Wikimedia asks) and caches the answers for 30 days. Pictures for cards are searched (Wikidata, Wikimedia Commons, Pixabay, Openverse) and fetched by the server too, so the visitor’s IP never reaches other sites: https only, raster images of at most 5 MB, under an hourly limit per person.
• Worker request logs are off. Limit counters, link codes and abandoned sync copies are deleted by a daily scheduled task.
• Cloudflare’s network absorbs volumetric attacks. On a custom domain you can additionally enable a WAF rate-limiting rule for /api/* and Bot Fight Mode.

Contributing

The easiest ways to help, no code needed: translate the interface into your language (one file, about 550 short strings), report a wrong word with the button on any card or dictionary entry, or open an issue about anything that confused you. Code is welcome too; see CONTRIBUTING.md. Questions and ideas go to Discussions.

If Ordkort helps you learn, a ⭐ on GitHub helps other learners find it.

License

GNU AGPL-3.0. You may use, study, change and share the code; if you run a modified version as a public service, you must publish your changes under the same license.

Credits

Official Norwegian dictionary data: ordbokene.no (Språkrådet and the University of Bergen). AI: Groq. Fonts: Geologica, Literata, Readex Pro, Noto Naskh Arabic — SIL Open Font License 1.1. QR codes: a port of Project Nayuki’s QR Code generator (MIT License). Anki packages: sql.js (SQLite in WebAssembly, MIT) and fzstd (MIT). Pictures: Wikimedia Commons (found through Wikidata), Pixabay and Openverse, each with its own licence and credit.