An Excellent Flashcard Software Package

[Ackbach]

My pastor, who is also a Linux and open-source software geek, put me onto an amazing flashcard software package called Anki. What's so amazing about this software? Well, it has a number of extremely useful features.

1. Enables you to memorize lots of stuff much more quickly than you would otherwise, because of its algorithm for deciding which cards to show you.
2. It runs on Windows, Mac, Linux, iOS, Android, and any computer with a browser.
3. It integrates with $\LaTeX$. Just put [latex] [/latex] codes around anything, including text, that you want $\LaTeX$ to parse. You can use the Ctrl-T + T (that's a Ctrl-T with another T after it) to do this quickly. (Using this feature requires that you have $\LaTeX$ installed on whatever device you're using Anki on.)
4. You can have image and movie flashcards, not just text.
5. You can automatically generate front-to-back and back-to-front cards with one operation.
6. It's highly customizable - you can choose how many new cards you want to get every day, as well as how many review cards you want to get every day.
7. It's open-source, and free!
8. You can sign up for a completely free web account, and synchronize your database of cards across all your devices.

Memorization has gotten a bad rap these days, because people think that schools stop at memorization and "dull rote learning". I would agree that if you stop at memorizing, you've not really gotten to real learning. But I would argue that true learning does need to start with memorization. How can you reason about things if you don't know things? And then how can you persuade others of your reasoning if you can't reason?

I would use this software package to memorize definitions and theorems in a math class. You can have hundreds of thousands of cards in one deck, and you can have multiple decks - this software package is not going to give out just when you're starting to tax your memory! Right now, I'm using it to memorize definitions and theorems in mathematical statistics, which I am studying on my own. I also use it to memorize Latin vocabulary - it's great for that, because the $\LaTeX$ allows me to put macrons in correctly! I can even have an 'i' without the dot, so that it looks better.

Enjoy!

 

[Evgeny.Makarov]

Thanks for telling us about this program.

Is it possible to require the user to type his/her answers? Some flashcard software relies on the user for telling whether they answered a question correctly. That is, the program shows a question, the user tries to answer it in his head, then presses a button to show the correct answer and tells the program if his answer is correct and how easy it was to remember it. I believe that in learning foreign words there is a difference between actually typing a word correctly (including all accents) and letting the program check the results on the one hand, and assessing yourself on the other. One may be tempted to gloss over small errors or just not notice them. I am especially interested if typing answers is available in the Android version.

 

[Ackbach]

Thanks for telling us about this program.

Is it possible to require the user to type his/her answers?

[EDIT to my previous response]: Yes, you can set it up using templates.

As the software is supposed to be more-or-less the same no matter how you access it, I would think you could use it that way on Android, the same as any of the other OS's it runs on. I don't know for sure, though.