Jan 11, 2019

Do you know Anki?

It began with a short DM last night, which I misunderstood at first:


Oh? Gábor must have read my mind. Just recently someone introduced me to Fotografia de Aves em Portugal, a public Facebook group for bird photography in Portugal, and I was thinking about making some sort of flashcard set to learn the bird names in Portuguese and English and maybe to do the same for all the mushrooms that I encounter at the quinta and out in the fields hunting. In fact, when I looked up the description of the desktop computer program Anki and its iOS mobile app companion, I realized that this is really what I have hoped to find for quite a long time for various learning tasks.

The computer app developed by Damien Elmes and its online server and synchronization site AnkiWeb are free; the charge for the iOS mobile app helps to support the development of all platforms. There is also a free compatible Android app by a different author. I like the idea of being able to coordinate my "learning decks" between devices and access them from anywhere. And a quick look at the import features tells me that it's not hard to send the content of some of my personal study term bases in memoQ to this application.

I assume this is an app he came across in his quest to learn Chinese; in fact, he did say that it's a tool that helps give one a fighting chance to learn all the myriad characters needed for basic literacy. And further research on my part showed that this is a popular tool for review in medical school and many other areas.

I downloaded and installed the app; the initial view was a little puzzling:


But within a few minutes I got my bearings and downloaded a few of the many "shared decks" online to familiarize myself with how the app works:


Pretty simple, really. Thank you, Gábor!

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