Flashcards from your italki lesson, and what italki keeps back

italki can hand you your lesson's vocabulary and grammar with no notes taken during class. It only does that when 4 separate conditions all held before you clicked join, and one of the 4 was your teacher's call.

Open the lesson you just paid for. Go to its Lesson Detail page and look for the Lesson Summary.

Either it's sitting there (topics, vocabulary, grammar, generated while you said goodbye), or the page has nothing on it and never will.

Tonight can't repair the second outcome. The summary is built from the lesson audio, and that recording either happened or it didn't. italki is blunt about the consent: "In order for ANY recording to be made, BOTH the teacher AND the student must agree to give permission for italki to record their lesson audio." A toggle you flip now doesn't reach backwards.

So the 4 conditions are a diagnosis. Which of the 3 situations you're in decides what's on the table tonight.

If you cleared all 4, italki solved capture for you. What people go looking for, some way to "automate flashcard creation from my actual lessons," is already on your screen.

The free summary covers what your teacher taught. Your error corrections, the sentences you got wrong and got fixed on, sit behind italki Plus.

Check these 4 things before anything else

Open italki, go to the lesson you just finished, and look at the Lesson Detail page. Either a Lesson Summary is sitting there or it isn't, and which one you're looking at was decided before the lesson started.

Four conditions have to hold at once. italki lists them in its own support article, and I've never found all 4 written out anywhere else.

• The lesson ran in italki Classroom. italki's wording: "The lessons must be taken in italki Classroom." A lesson you took on Zoom with the same teacher produces nothing.
• Your recording toggle was on. "Make sure to turn on your lesson audio recording in the Privacy Settings." That's where the switch lives, not in the lesson screen.
• Your teacher's was on too. "In order for ANY recording to be made, BOTH the teacher AND the student must agree to give permission for italki to record their lesson audio." italki's advice: "ask them to turn on their lesson audio recording to enable the learning tools, or you can find teachers who provide these accesses by searching for those with the 'Smart Lesson' label."
• Your language is supported. Smart Lesson covers 35 languages, and Spanish, French, Italian, Portuguese and Russian are all on the list.

One more thing while you're in there: the recording only happens in the web version of italki Classroom.

Now the part that decides your evening. These 4 conditions are a diagnosis, not a repair job.

If your toggle was off during tonight's lesson, tonight's audio doesn't exist. Turning it on now fixes every lesson from here and does nothing for the hour you just paid for.

So you're in one of 3 situations, and the rest of this page is written for all 3.

• All 4 held. The summary is on the Lesson Detail page right now. The next section is about what it hands you, and what it holds back.
• One failed, and you know which. Tonight is a salvage job from memory, and you've got about an hour before the details go soft. Fix the toggle for next time, then jump to the branch at the end of this page.
• You're not sure, or the summary is empty. Check Privacy Settings, then message your teacher. italki also lets you build one by hand: "we also provide a backup solution where you can manually create a Lesson Summary with your own notes and text resource."

One more thing before you pay for anything. italki Plus carries a 30-day free trial, and the error corrections sit behind it. If you're in situation 1, start the trial tonight and read the enhanced summary for this lesson before you decide whether it's worth $5.99 a month.

That's a real recommendation, and I sell the alternative.

What the free summary actually hands you

Open the Lesson Detail page for tonight's lesson. If a summary generated, it's sitting there in 3 labelled parts, and italki's own wording is exact: "Topics: A brief overview of the subjects discussed. Vocabulary: Key words and definitions introduced during the lesson. Grammar: Explanations of the sentence structures and rules covered."

That's a good free tier. italki calls it a "Smart Lesson" tool that "helps you quickly review what was covered without needing to take manual notes during your session," and it does exactly that, for nothing.

Tonight the 3 parts are worth wildly different amounts.

Topics: read it once, keep none of it. "Weekend plans, then the imperfect" tells you where the hour went, and nothing else.

Vocabulary: your raw material, and a good chunk of it is filler. A word your tutor used once in passing sits at the same weight as the word you reached for 4 times and missed.

So rank it yourself, while you can still hear the lesson in your head. Put a dot next to every item you fumbled, hesitated over, or heard your tutor correct out loud.

I stop at 8 dots. That's the most cards I've ever built in one sitting and still opened on the Thursday. If a 25-word list gives you 3 dots, you're done in 4 minutes.

Dotted items win because struggle and correction outrank exposure, the ranking argued out on the italki notes comparison.

Grammar: the part that resists becoming a card. You can recite an explanation cleanly at 11pm and still freeze mid-sentence on Thursday.

Every grammar point you keep has to become a sentence with a hole in it, and where the hole goes is its own craft. Take your dotted points to the guide on turning lessons into flashcards.

Lesson Practice, on the same page, turns the summary into exercises, and the free tier gets "Vocabulary & Grammar Practice" (italki Plus adds AI Roleplay and unlimited repeats). Run it before you close the tab.

It can also refuse, and italki publishes the reason plainly: it won't generate "if there's not enough content from the lesson summary, i.e. fewer than 5 vocabulary words, or no grammar points."

So count the vocabulary list first. Under 5 items, the exercises are gone and your dotted words are the whole yield of the hour you paid for.

What to do when the corrections are the part you can't see

Your free summary is a syllabus. Topics, vocabulary, grammar: what your teacher meant to cover, and mostly did.

The moments where you said something wrong and got fixed are the paid part. Verbatim, from italki's support article: "For italki Plus subscribers, the summary is enhanced with advanced insights: Error Corrections: Feedback on mistakes made during the lesson and how to fix them. Idioms & Fixed Expressions".

Plus is $5.99 a month, or $4.99 a month billed annually, $59.99 a year, with a 30-day free trial.

So on the free tier, the only copy of tonight's corrections is the one in your head. Write it down tonight, while the audio is still playing.

Search on interruption. Ask where your teacher stopped you mid-sentence.

A correction has a shape you sat through: a pause, your word repeated back with one syllable different, you saying it again. Walk the lesson forward from the greeting and pick those moments off in order.

For each one, write 2 lines. What you said. What they said back.

Half-remember it? Write the shortest sentence you'd honestly swear you said, and put a question mark beside it. A hedged real sentence beats a dictionary example, because you can hear yourself saying it.

Then read the free summary's vocabulary list against your pairs, one word at a time, asking: did I produce this out loud, or did I nod at it?

Both kinds sit in the same font on that page. They don't feel the same to you, and that difference is worth writing down.

Card the nodded ones first. Verbamor sorts a transcript on much the same footing, and I've written out why on the italki notes comparison. Tonight it does nothing for you.

Getting the lesson out of italki

Your lesson was recorded. You still can't have it.

italki says so plainly: "The audio recording is saved on italki's private storage. It will be anonymized and used solely to improve the learning and teaching experience on italki." That recording exists to build your summary. It was never a file you were going to own.

So start where the text is. Open tonight's lesson on its Lesson Detail page, drag across the Topics, Vocabulary and Grammar blocks, and copy. That works on your phone, on the free tier, right now.

The other recording is the Record Lesson button inside Classroom. Press it and "the video will be saved automatically to your default drive for browser downloads on your computer", and italki is clear that "the video recording is not saved or uploaded to any online server... italki does not have access to your video."

Then read the restrictions. The button is "currently only supported in the Chrome, Edge, and Firefox web browsers", and you and your teacher both have to agree before it records anything. If you took the lesson in Safari, or in the app on your phone, italki's list has already answered the question for you.

You also press it before the lesson. Which means the decision about tonight got made an hour ago, by someone who didn't know they were making it.

And what lands is a video: "The videos will be in a WEBM format". Anything you want to do with the speech starts with pulling the audio out of that, at 11pm, using software you probably don't have.

The third thing that leaves italki is whatever you typed into the notes pane, or into the manual summary italki offers as "a backup solution where you can manually create a Lesson Summary with your own notes and text resource."

Copy the text. It's the only one of the 3 with no conditions on it, and I'd still pick it if the video button worked in every browser on earth.

Text also travels further than a video does. Paste a summary into Verbamor and it goes through the same classifier a spoken lesson gets, up to 80,000 characters, which no lesson summary is going to fill. Paste it into a doc instead and work it by hand with the card-writing method.

Recording is the route with a deadline on it, and tonight's has passed. You can't reach back and record Tuesday's lesson on Wednesday, which is why the branch in the next section splits on what you already have.

The next hour, branched by which route you're in

Three routes came out of the 4 conditions. Run yours and be done before the lesson goes cold.

Route A: all 4 held, and the summary is on the Lesson Detail page.

Read the Vocabulary block first. Grammar second. Topics last, for 30 seconds, since italki calls it "A brief overview of the subjects discussed" and that's a table of contents.

That list arrives flat. The word your teacher used once while pouring coffee sits at the same weight as the one you stalled on twice.

So dot every item you fumbled out loud, and keep only the dots.

Copy them into a note, or paste the whole block into Verbamor, whose paste screen takes 80,000 characters and ranks what it finds by whether you struggled with it. Writing the cards is its own craft: the flashcards guide.

Route B: the page is blank, and it stays blank.

Tonight's audio was never captured, so start with what's in your head. Write every moment your tutor stopped you mid-sentence, each one as the wrong sentence you actually said.

Say each one aloud as you type it. Saying it is the first review.

Then fix the pipe. Turn on lesson audio recording in your Privacy Settings and book the next lesson in a browser.

Message your tutor too, since italki is explicit that "BOTH the teacher AND the student must agree" or nothing gets recorded. If yours would rather not, italki's search carries a "Smart Lesson" label you can filter on.

Route C: you're on italki Plus, so the good part is already written down.

Go straight to Error Corrections, then Idioms & Fixed Expressions. Those are the two blocks Plus adds, and italki defines the first as "Feedback on mistakes made during the lesson and how to fix them."

Card those before you touch Vocabulary. A correction is a sentence you got wrong out loud an hour ago with the embarrassment still attached, and the item most likely to still be wrong in November.

Then run Vocabulary as a second pass, same dot test as route A.

Whichever route you ran, read tonight's items out loud once before bed. Tonight rather than tomorrow matters more than the 3 minutes suggests, for reasons in the sleep post.

Who should just buy italki Plus instead

Here's the arithmetic.

italki Plus is $5.99 a month, or $4.99 a month billed annually, which comes to $59.99 a year. Verbamor is $19.99 a month, or $129.99 a year with a 7-day trial on the annual plan only, and no free tier.

Plus also opens with a 30-day free trial, so you can find out whether the corrections and idioms are worth anything before a charge lands.

They're different purchases. Plus bolts tools onto lessons you already buy on italki. Verbamor bills whether or not you booked a lesson.

Two limits on my side, and they're real.

Verbamor is iOS and iPadOS only, 16.4 or later. If you're on a Pixel, the paste route above ends nowhere, and Plus is the honest answer.

And Verbamor holds on to words you've already met. It won't teach you your first thousand. If you're 3 lessons into Portuguese and every word in the summary is new, a beginner course moves you faster.

That limit is about your level, not about owning a tutor. You can build cards by pasting text or saving words out of Translate. If you'd rather test the habit first, the routine in the free handbook costs nothing.

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