what apps do you use to train vocabulary?
Anki. End of discussion. If you don't know what Anki is, it's a flashcard app that automatically schedules cards for you based on how hard or easy you say the cards are. So if you tell Anki a card is easy, it might, say, schedule the next review for 30 days later, whereas if you say it's hard, it might schedule the next review for 2 days later. Anki:
- Is free and open source
- Has a huge community, and with it, tons of plugins, premade flashcard decks, tutorials, and integration with other programs
- Just has tons of features and customizability in general.
- Just recently got a new scheduling algorithm called FSRS, which is scientifically proven to be one of the most accurate flashcard scheduling algorithms in the world at predicting when you're on the verge of forgetting a card (but make sure you enable it in the settings)
- Has synchronization between mobile and PC
Anki can be a bit intimidating, as there's a bit of a learning curve to using the app in the first place, but I promise you that all the other options like Quizlet or whatever aren't even close to as good as Anki.
Completely agree with this. Anki isn't perfect, but if you ever find anything better, I want to know what it is.
Getting started with "Basic" or "Basic (and reversed card)" notes is almost as easy as writing on each side of a physical card, but if you find yourself repeating information—either exactly or with the same kind of variations—it's well worth looking at making your own note types.
For example, following each Arabic lesson, I was adding each letter into Anki. I wanted to recognise the different forms so, at first, I had 4 notes for each letter:—
ن ⇄ t
تـ ⇄ t (initial)
ـتـ ⇄ t (medial)
ـت ⇄ t (final)
With cards generated for both directions, that's 8 cards, but also eight bits of typing.
Once I recognised the pattern, I made a new note type with "Letter" and "Transliteration" fields. Now I only need to add two things, but I still get eight cards automatically generated by Anki for each letter. Okay, I needed to create some card templates too, but the modifications weren't more complicated than adding "ـ" before/after the Arabic letter (to produce each of the different forms) and " (medial)" etc. after the transliteration. This was about two minutes' work, and it only had to be spent once, but now all the remaining letters can make use of it, saving much more time over all.
And if I'd been really lazy, I could have just downloaded any of the published decks.
The other thing I'd say is: it's very easy to overdo things at the start before the gaps between reviews have been filled in. So start slow and keep your learning queue under control. If it starts growing and growing, stop the new cards completely, reduce the queue, and then restart the new cards with a reduced daily limit.
This is great! Just a small thing, you wrote ن instead of ت, I know it's probably a typo but just to make sure.
Yeah, I don't know what happened with my fingers there. I'm still learning the layout but having the first two letters you taught on the index fingers made those easy to learn to type. I even chose ت for the example specifically because it's the same key as ـ and I am super
lazyefficient when it comes to typing. However, I do remember I didn't make the text nice and big first; at the normal size, without the other alongside for comparison, ت ن .It's right in Anki, though. One of the other advantages of custom notes is editing the styling so the letters are literally ten times as large. And if it had been wrong, a single correction would have fixed all eight cards.
Ankidroid
I set mine up so i actually have to type in the words which really helps me with remembering spelling
I hate typing on my phone, the fact that it syncs with a computer makes it perfect!
Note, AnkiDroid is a semi-official Android version of the underlying Anki software, which is also available for free at https://apps.ankiweb.net/