Anki

4.0 stars

"Great flashcard program but a bit quirky"

December 18, 2011  |   By Bill Osler

Version: Anki 1.2.8

Pros

The desktop program works well for most users, and it has a variety of plug-ins that expand its capability for things like Japanese vocabulary. It is possible to present flash cards in more than one form (eg: user sees the 'front' and answers with the 'back' or vice versa) and the program adjusts the scheduling for the 'front' and 'back' separately based on accuracy of recall. Basic card design is fairly simple, and it is fairly easy to import text files. There are versions for mobile devices. I use the Windows version on my Win 7 computer at home and the iPhone version on my iPod Touch - but the iPhone version is NOT free. I have read that there is also an Android version but I don't know anything about it. Using the portable version allows me to do my learning 'homework' whether I am near the home PC or not.

Cons

Like anything else, there is a learning curve. The basic program seems to be the product of one programmer working by himself. That means the documentation/support information is a bit uneven.

Summary

A really useful flashcard program with some quirks. It has really helped me in my foreign language study.

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5.0 stars

"It's a must have educational software!"

July 5, 2011  |   By d4rk_l1gh7

Version: Anki 1.2.8

Pros

Feature rich and powerful; provides excellent statistics, hundreds of decks to download freely, audio support, many forms of answering, flexibility while creating cards, save progress online (cloud applicabilities), well documented.

Cons

LaTeX is overall complicated, therefore, writing math formulas is complicated. Makes a lot of Deck Backups, depending on the size of the deck, you'll probably have 1gb after you use it, but settings are adjustable.

Summary

I usually have a hard time remembering facts and some school facts. But as a high school student, I don't really care about what they teach at school. What I really care about is learning what I want. And one of the things I have wanted to learn for quite some time now is Japanese. But, thanks to technical difficulties and not being able to find a teacher, I started to look for ways to dictate myself on Japanese. I went to look for resources, and believe it or not, Anki was there begging for me to download it. So I did. The first thing I did was download a deck. I tried that one deck for a few weeks until I got bored of it, and downloaded another, which is the one I'm currently using, very complete and very well organized.

Now that you have the story, I'll explain my first impressions. First, I clicked the "Download" button to download a deck. The deck list was surprising, not only because it has many decks available, but because of the deck descriptions. Another thing that surprised me was the designs. It's well designed and it fits well with my system (Ubuntu 11.04). Another thing that impressed me was the statistics, which I love playing around with. It's very complete, you'll find no fault there. You can check your Deck progress efficiently.

Going more in depth. Anki has features for deck optimization, it can import decks from other programs. The way you make decks can intimidate newcomers, it's very dynamic and you can create diversified decks. Talking about creating decks... Like I wrote, it's complicated and flexible. That's why you can achieve some very nice decks. When add a card, it shows a big screen with the front side and the back, or better yet, fields of the deck. You write your questions and answers there. Very intuitive, in my opinion, it helps the user a lot, though... to check all of the cards you have already created, look at the top menu, click Edit, and then Browse Items. You'll get to see all of the cards you wrote, you can modify them, and check em all. It might be a bit scary after opening this thing with big decks, but you can filter it, reducing the list size... a bit. From here, you can delete and modify cards. It is easier, but a bit more scarier than adding cards.

Other important aspects of this program is the SRS. It basically spaces out every card you have successfully learned. This not only helps with memorization, but it keeps you from forgetting old facts. Anki also introduces new cards when you want it to, reducing the head stress. These two little facts of life makes this program incredibly efficient.

Another neat aspect of this program is that it saves your progress data over the cloud so you can continue learning on another place or location, that supports Anki. This way, you can keep your Android Anki, your iPhone Anki, and your Desktop Anki in sync without much hassle. It's a very nice Feature.

Now, Anki also has its bad points, and one of them is that writing mathematical equations can be a bit complicated. You have to know some LaTeX scripting. Trust me, it's not easy. Though, you can get math or physics decks off the net with everything already there. It's just that programming a bit just to get math equations is a bit too much for casual users. Another bad point is that Anki saves a lot of backups just for one deck on the computer by default. If you download a 70mb deck, you have to multiply the size by 30 (amount of default backups), you get 2.1gbs. It's a lot, but I can see why the programmers did it. You can also change the settings so it won't make a lot of backups. It's just that if you end up using a lot of Gbs after downloading anki decks, it's probably the backups.

Over all, Even with Anki's faults, I still give it a 5/5. Why? Because I love it. It's not a question of devotion, but as a question of necessity. I don't use the features that I gave negative ratins as often as the other features, so I get more out of it. If you don't thing it's worthy buying it, then just download it. Since it's free, you won't lose anything, really. Bottom line - It rocks!

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