Kindle Vocabulary Builder to Spaced Repetition, Without Anki
If you read in another language on a Kindle, you are already doing the hardest part of learning vocabulary. You meet words in real books, at exactly your level of interest, and you look them up — long-press, read the definition, keep going. Hundreds of times.
And the Kindle quietly keeps every one of them. Each lookup goes into the Vocabulary Builder, together with the sentence you read it in and the book it came from.
What the Kindle doesn't do is bring those words back before you forget them. Vocabulary Builder has flashcards, but no review schedule, and it is widely reported to keep only your most recent 2,000 lookups and drop the older ones without a word. That is why a small ecosystem of tools exists just to export it into Anki — and why so many how-to posts walk you through note types and deck settings.
So Word Holder can now do the obvious thing: take the Kindle's vocabulary file and turn every word in it into a saved word, with its sentence and its book, ready for review tomorrow. No Anki, no deck to set up, no card templates.
What you need
A Kindle e-reader (Paperwhite, Oasis, Scribe, the basic Kindle…), its USB cable and a computer, Windows or Mac.
That is the honest limitation: the Kindle apps for phones and tablets don't let you get at this file, so this only works for the e-readers.
Step 1: find vocab.db on your Kindle
Connect the Kindle to your computer with the USB cable.
On Windows: open This PC, then the Kindle drive. The file lives in the system folder, which Windows hides — in File Explorer choose View → Show → Hidden items (or tick Hidden items on older versions). Then open system\vocabulary.
On a Mac: older Kindles show up as a drive in Finder. Recent ones don't, because macOS can't open them directly; a free app such as OpenMTP can copy the file for you, and its own guides explain how. Either way, the file is in system/vocabulary.
Inside there is a file called vocab.db. That small file is the whole Vocabulary Builder: every word you looked up, the sentence it came from and the book.
Step 2: drop it on Word Holder
Open Import from Kindle and drop vocab.db onto the page, or click to pick it.
The file is read in your browser. It is never uploaded — only the words, their sentences and the book titles are sent, which is all Word Holder needs.
Before anything is imported you see what is in the file, grouped by language and by book. Nothing is ticked yet; you decide:
- Which books. Tick the ones whose words you want to review, or tick a language to take all its books. The thriller you read in your own language, the book you gave up on after two chapters: leave them out. Languages Word Holder doesn't support yet, and lookups the Kindle recorded without a language, are shown greyed out and can't be imported.
- What each book is called as a tag. Book titles get long (Storia di una gabbianella e del gatto che le insegnò a volare), so Word Holder suggests a short tag — Storia di una — and you can change it to whatever you like, or clear it. Keep a tag of its own for each import: if you change your mind later, you can remove all its words at once from My words.
Then press Import.
What you get
Every looked-up word becomes a saved word in your collection:
- Under its dictionary form. The Kindle records the word as you met it — mangiavano, went — and Word Holder files it under mangiare and go. Several forms of the same word become one entry.
- With the sentence you read it in, as the word's note, so you remember where you met it. Kindle's sentences are often long or cut in the middle; the import keeps just the sentence with the word in it.
- With the book as a tag, so you can filter your words by book — or go through one book's words again before rereading it.
- With a review card, due tomorrow. From there the spaced-repetition schedule takes over: a day later, then about a week, then weeks — each time just before you would forget.
Definitions are written when you first open a word or review it, the same way as for any word you save. Words that aren't in the dictionary of the language you chose — mostly character names and places — are left out, and so are little grammar words like articles and prepositions, which are never reviewed; the import tells you how many of each.
Next month, do it again
Read more, look up more words, and import the newer vocab.db the same way. Only the new lookups become new words. A word you already have keeps your note, your tags and its review progress; the import only adds what it lacks: the sentence you read it in, below your note, and the book as a tag. Importing the same file twice adds nothing the second time.
If your plan's word limit stops an import, Word Holder says so plainly and keeps your most recent lookups. You can look at the plans, and after upgrading simply import the same file again to add the rest.
Why not Anki?
If you love Anki and all your reading happens on a Kindle, an Anki export is a perfectly good setup — I compare the options honestly in Anki for reading. The difference is everything after the import: no note types to configure, no deck to maintain, and the same place to keep looking words up when you read on your phone or in a browser. Every new word, from wherever, ends up in the same review.
That is the whole idea of Word Holder, really: you read, you look things up, and the remembering takes care of itself.