Anki, a first-rate free flashcard app

I downloaded the current version of Anki, a really good flashcard program. As the site notes:

Anki is a program that makes remembering things easy. Because it’s a lot more efficient than traditional study methods, you can either greatly decrease your time spent studying, or greatly increase the amount you learn. [or both – LG]

Anyone who needs to remember things in their daily life can benefit from Anki. Since it is content-agnostic and supports images, audio, videos and scientific markup (via LaTeX), the possibilities are endless.
For example:

• Learning a language
• Studying for medical and law exams
• Memorizing people’s names and faces
• Brushing up on geography
• Mastering long poems
• Even practicing guitar chords!

I will note that Anki’s own documentation is terrible  — see this post for a good description of how to make a deck.

Anki uses both active recall (you have to come up with the answer) and spaced repetition and reinforcement — that is, things harder to recall show up more frequently and things easier to recall not so often (but still do show up at intervals).

It’s worth noting that Anki works on iPhone and Android, so you can review and study wherever you are.

I did find some things about it puzzling at first, but I worked them out. Here’s what I wish I had known at the start. I highly recommend that you read that post and watch the video it contains.

Anki has a ton of shared decks of information ready to go:

AnkiWeb is a free companion to the computer version of Anki. AnkiWeb can be used to review online when you don’t have access to your home computer, and can be used to keep your cards synchronized across multiple machines.

AnkiWeb is intended to be used in conjunction with the computer version of Anki. While it is possible to create basic text-only cards and review them using only AnkiWeb, to download shared decks, take advantage of multimedia features and so on, you will need to use the free computer version as well. If you have not used Anki before, please start with the computer version.

And after you install the computer version, your first action is to click on “Sync” in the top-line menu to link your computer-resident Anki with your on-line Anki account so — as it says just above — you can keep your decks in synch regardless of where you reviewed the cards. Moreover, if the author of a deck updates it, you will automatically get the udated version.

Here are examples of ready-to-go decks:

Languages
Arabic, Chinese, English, Esperanto, French, German, Hebrew, Japanese, Korean, Russian, Spanish

Art, sciences, and trivia
Anatomy, Biology, Chemistry, Geography, History, Law, Math, Music, Pathology, Physics

Anki is really an excellent program. Let me draw you attention to some decks that assist with learning Esperanto vocabulary. On the page that lists all Esperanto shared decks, note the columns at the right, particularly the number of notes (i.e., deck size) and shows where audio and/or images are included.

Esperanto 101 – based on recommendations from the editors of Kontakto
Esperanto Affixes  – excellent coverage of the set of Esperanto prefixes and suffixes
Lernu Esperanto Course Vocabulary
Esperanto Duolingo Words
Duolingo Esperanto, Checkpoint 0-1
Duolingo Esperanto, Checkpoint 1-2
Duolingo Esperanto, Checkpoint 2-3, V2

And note especially Esperanto to English ordered by Wikipedia Usage Frequency (61,907 notes!). Quite comprehensive — and keep in mind you can edit the cards in your own copy of the deck as you see fit. This deck strikes me as particularly valuable.

It’s a good idea to create your own deck for personal use, adding to it the words you run across that you didn’t know. In time this deck will become invaluable. Make sure that the deck uses a card form that will use both sides as prompts — that is, showing you the Esperanto word for you to provide the English definition, and separately showing you the English definition for you to provide the Esperanto word.

The can be useful for you who are studying languages at home with your children.

More information on Esperanto, including why it works so well.