How to tag sentences for Anki

The syntax

Type # followed by the tag name, then press enter.

It works in two places: the comment box and the main sentence field. Tag wherever is convenient in the moment — they end up in the same place.

What tags are for

Not organisation for its own sake. They exist so that the sentence remains findable after it leaves the lesson.

Tags travel with the sentence into Anki. Once there, the student can study a subset instead of the whole deck:

Browse → Filter, or type tag:subjunctive into the search bar.

That is the entire payoff, and it is a bigger one than it sounds. A student with 400 sentences and no tags has one undifferentiated pile. The same student with tags can drill every sentence containing the sound they are currently working on, or every sentence from the fortnight before an exam, or every past-tense sentence they have ever got wrong.

Tags can be combined, so tag:past tag:spoken narrows further.

A scheme that survives

The failure mode is inventing a tag once and never reusing it. After a term you have 80 tags used an average of 1.4 times, which is exactly as useful as no tags.

Pick a small number of axes and stay on them:

Axis	Examples	Why
Grammar	#past, #subjunctive, #cases, #wordorder	The most common thing to want to drill in isolation
Sound	#r, #nasal, #stress, #length	Pairs with pronunciation work — see below
Topic	#work, #travel, #family	Situational, and how students think about need
Status	#hard, #exam	Sparingly. #hard earns its place; most others do not

Three to four tags per sentence is plenty. Ten is a filing system nobody will use.

The sound tag is underused

If you are doing pronunciation work — five minutes every lesson, which is the cadence that works — tag every sentence by the sound you were targeting.

Two months later, tag:r is every sentence you have ever used to work on that student’s trill, with audio and phonetic transcription on each one. That is a purpose-built drill set assembled without anyone assembling it.

It also makes progress legible, which matters more than it sounds: replaying the earliest tag:r recording next to the most recent one is the most persuasive evidence of improvement a student can be given, and it is the main defence against the month-three plateau.

Tag during, not after

Tags added while typing the sentence cost nothing. Tags added in a tidy-up session later never happen — and even if they did, you would be reconstructing from memory which sound you were working on three weeks ago.

The habit is: capture the sentence, add the two or three tags in the same breath, move on.

Then the deck runs itself

Tagged sentences export to Anki as real cards — sentence, audio, phonetic transcription — which is the difference between a card that teaches a translation and one that teaches a usable piece of language.

This is also the step that closes the loop on spaced repetition: the review queue is built from sentences the student personally reached for and could not produce, rather than from a downloaded frequency list. Why that matters, and how to set the deck up so it does not collapse in week three: Anki for language learning.