I'd like to be able to click unfamiliar words in Chrome and automatically create notes in Anki 2 using an online dictionary. It'd also be nice to have an automatic method for sending text and images to Anki notes straight from Chrome. For example, if I read an article here that I want to remember, I'd be able to highlight the title, send it to Anki, and when I review, I'd see the title on the card's front with the reverse being a link to the source if I forgot what the post was about.
I found some Chrome extensions that purport to do this sort of thing, but didn't get any of them to work with Anki 2. Is anyone currently doing this, and if so, what is the solution?
I use Anki to learn material from textbooks, with great results. Creating the cards takes time, but so does summarizing the material (as Luke suggests); and the benefits associated to a SRS (specifically, the testing and spacing effects) make this approach clearly superior to any of the alternatives I tried.
Briefly, I write one note every paragraph, with a question on one side whose answer, written on the other side, is the main idea of that paragraph. Sometimes a note summarizes the content of more than one paragraph, if discussion of a single idea is spread over multiple paragraphs. Some textbooks include chapter or section summaries, and when they are sufficiently detailed, I'll rely on these to create the cards instead. Here's a sample card from Peter Gray's Psychology:
(This textbook is a particularly good example of "knowledge ready for ankification" because each page comes with 1-3 marginal "focus questions" intended to guide the student in the process of learning the material. So in this particular instance one can simply write these questions on the front side of each card, as I did.)
I also create a separate card for each term or expression that is explicitly defined and whose definition I don't already know. Many textbooks include a glossary, which simplifies the process of writing down these definitions. Here's a sample card, from Ivo Welch's Corporate Finance:
Is your Psychology deck public? I'd really like to have a look at it if so.