This exists. Nihongo Lessons is the first to come to mind.
The monolingual cards start from Intermediate level. They are sentences with very brief monolingual definitions of the new word being learned, all building on previously learned words.
Originally it was “Jalup”, which was a great app with some nifty features. The creator of Jalup sold it last year, and as far as I can tell the content of Nihongo Lessons is still the same.