About Kartenmeister
What is this?
Kartenmeister builds full German lessons you can study in the browser or push to Anki for long-term review. Each lesson bundles vocabulary, useful phrases, a grammar explainer with drills, and a short dialogue with audio — all built around a single topic.
A pre-built library covers the standard CEFR curriculum (A1 through B2), so you can start studying right away. If you want to learn a topic that isn't in the library, or invent your own scenario, you can plug in your own Anthropic API key to generate one on demand.
How it works
Choose a CEFR level and a topic from the suggestions, or switch to Custom scenario to describe your own (e.g. "ordering coffee in Vienna" or "talking to a doctor about back pain").
Each lesson opens in a Study view — a clean, read-only layout for browsing vocab, phrases, grammar notes, exercises, and dialogue. Translations are hidden by default so you can self-quiz before revealing.
Switch to the Cards view to preview every card, deselect anything you don't want, and push to Anki section by section (vocab, phrases, grammar, exercises) into the decks of your choice.
Lessons you've opened are saved to My Lessons, so you can re-study them or push more cards later without regenerating.
What's in a lesson
Core words for the topic with English translations, example sentences, and full grammatical detail — noun genders and plurals, verb conjugations, adjective forms. Useful phrases sit alongside as ready-made expressions you can drop into conversation.
A short explainer with tables, examples, and common mistakes, followed by active-practice drills: fill-in-the-blank, word ordering, sentence transformations, and matching.
A short scripted conversation between two speakers using the lesson's vocabulary and grammar in context. Each line has TTS audio you can play individually or all at once.
Vocab cards include text-to-speech audio (via the HyperTTS Anki add-on) and image slots. You can override any image with your own file or URL before pushing to Anki.
Custom scenarios (optional)
The CEFR library covers the standard curriculum. If you want a lesson on a topic that isn't there — or your own custom scenario — you can add an Anthropic API key in settings. This uses Claude to generate the lesson on demand.
Generating a lesson takes about a minute and costs roughly $0.20 on your own Anthropic account. You'll need to add credits there first.
Setting up an API key
- Create an account at console.anthropic.com
- Go to Settings → Billing and add credit ($5 minimum, enough for around 20 lessons)
- Go to Settings → API Keys and create a new key
- Copy the key (starts with
sk-ant-) and paste it into the settings panel on the Lesson page
Your key is stored only in your browser's local storage and is sent directly to Anthropic — it is never saved on our server.
Getting started
If you're new here, head to the Setup page to install Anki and the required add-ons, then pick your first topic on the Lesson page. You can also browse and study lessons in the browser without setting up Anki at all.