What are Anki Flashcards?
Anki is a Japanese word meaning ‘to memorise’. Anki is also an application that facilitates memorisation of, well, – almost everything, including, of course, vocabulary items.
Anki is a program which 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.
Anki implements spaced repetition. Spaced repetition is an evidence-based learning technique that is usually performed with flashcards. Newly introduced and more difficult flashcards are shown more frequently while older and less difficult flashcards are shown less frequently in order to exploit the psychological spacing effect.
This is how it works: Anki shows you a vocabulary card, let’s say rumah. You just learned that rumah means house, and you flip the card. Anki now gives you three choices: it asks you whether it was easy, whether you hesitated, or whether you didn’t remember the word. If you. remembered the word easily, Anki will not ask you again during this session, but it will ask again in a week. If after a week you still know that rumah means house, it will ask. again in a month. If after a month you still remember the word, Anki knows that you have memorised it very. well, but, just. to be. on the safe side, it. will prompt. you again in a year!
This way, you can be sure that you will memorise learned vocabulary for ever. And of course you can customise Anki, say to no more than 20 vocabulary items, or to 10 minutes per day (which you can of course extend if you have the time).
Anki also comes with all kinds of statistics of your learned vocabulary, and it is very flexible from card layout to review timing. You learn either Indonesian to English or vice versa. Anki also supports audio. The words are not only displayed, they are also spoken, not by a computer voice, but by a native speaker – we recorded thousands of words for you! You can also switch off the text display and only listen to the items.
Anki is available for almost all platforms. This makes it especially useful: you can learn your vocabulary using your. cell phone while waiting for the bus, or during a coffee break. Anki is supported by Android, iOS (iPhones), Windows, Linux and Mac OS X
And the best thing is – Anki is a free application. Well, at least for Android, and for all computers. If you are an iPhone user, they charge you $25, but, hey, when you can afford an iPhone, then $25 are nothing, right?
We have developed Anki decks for almost all of our courses, but for the upper level courses Anki is no longer audio supported because at that stage you already know how to pronounce Indonesian.
As an alternative to Anki, at least for The Indonesian Way, you can also use Quizlet, but without audio support.
So go to your course homepage, and check the link to the Anki download page. We provide the Anki flashcard decks, but you must download the Anki application yourself.