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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.

Recently we received a number of encouraging testimonials. Especially heartening are the reviews that compare us favourably to our much more expensive competitors like Babbel, Duolingo etc.

Uli P. first purchased the Basic membership, and then upgraded to the Student edition. Uli writes:

A learner from Australia, who also started to learn with a similar online program, but then switched to «Indonesian Online» told us: “Can’t believe how much my Indonesian has improved!” She then continues:

Another Australian woman is using several online programs but favours «Indonesian Online»:

Platinum user Steven Joel B. also finds «Indonesian Online» more useful than Babble & Co.:

We feel very honoured having received such wonderful testimonials. If you also want to review us, please do so here: Testimonial page.

IndoLingo

IndoLingo lets you communicate with a native speaker of Indonesian through the IndoLingo content of «The Indonesian Way». Every module of «The Indonesian Way» has at least ten IndoLingo speaking assignments. In each assignment you are given a speaking task. You record your voice and after submission it will be assessed by an instructor. The instructor will look at the accuracy of the word choice (vocabulary), the accuracy of the structure (grammar), and most importantly the accuracy of the pronunciation. The instructor will return your assignment in form of a sound file with comments on vocabulary and grammar, and the instructor will especially address your pronunciation and will help you to pronounce Indonesian correctly and will guide you to achieve a near-native pronunciation of the Indonesian language.

IndoLingo is now available in the TIW shop. The person you will communicate with is Rustian Gunadi (Age).

May be you have heard it already that forming the Indonesian plural is very simple. You simply reduplicate the noun. So anak is child and anak-anak are children.

Unfortunately, this is not correct. In the Indonesian language, every noun can be either singular or plural. So mobil saya can mean both ‘my car’ as well as ‘my cars’, and saya beli pisang can mean both ‘I bought a banana’ as well as ‘I bought bananas’. Only if it is not clear from the context, you may reduplicate mobil saya to mobil-mobil saya, but as everybody understands that you bought more than one banana, there is no need to reduplicate pisang.

Reduplication also does not occur if a whole class of things is referred to such as rusa bertanduk ‘deers have antlers’. Nouns are also not reduplicated if the plurality is expressed by a number or an indefinite number (many, several etc).

Plus, there are lots of words that take a different meaning when reduplicated:

Other words only exist in their reduplicated form:

Reduplication can be found not just in nouns but also in verbs, adjectives and other parts of speech.

So reduplication in Indonesian is not a simple matter, but actually quite complex.

Honolulu, 16/02/2019
Uli Sembiring

My wonderful teaching assistant, Ruri from Bengkulu, made me aware that The Indonesian Way (TIW) no longer shows a link to the Quizlet flashcards. Apparently the links “dropped” in the process of restructuring TIW.

Then I found out, that besides for TIW, there are also Quizlet cards for AnekaBaca and BacaYuk!, our learning materials for intermediate Indonesian,

According to Wikipedia, “Quizlet is a mobile and web-based study application that allows students to study information via learning tools and games. It is currently used by 2-in-3 high school students and 1-in-3 college students in the United States”.

The flashcards for Indonesian Online were not made by the IO team, but by users. While I have linked to Quizlet on the sidebar of TIW, the links are only to the eight modules of TIW, but if you go into Quizlet, you will discover that there are also flashcards for every single lesson.

The flashcards were made by more than one Indonesian language learner, and some flashcards also contain entire sentences. One of the most prolific Quizleter for TIW also made flashcards for AnekaBaca and for BacaYuk!. They are not easy to find, at least not through the search function, but when you click on the link for Gordon Jenkins – his Avatar is a turtle – then you can see the flashcards for AnekaBaca and BacaYuk!.

Unfortunately, BacaYuk! was spelled BakaYuk! And if you are a native speaker of English, it may be useful to you, that Gordon added a spelling guide. So for the word ‘puluhan’, his pronunciation guide is ‘POO.loo.han’ where the capital letters indicate that this is the syllable that is emphasised. Unfortunately Gordon did not use the IPA transcription, which is not only universal (for non-native speakers of English, the pronunciation guide is rather confusing), but also far more accurate.

Gordon also created useful vocabulary subsets. For instance, there is one that contains 89 Indonesian words for “emotions, feelings and personality”. This is very useful, but again, be careful with the pronunciation guide. For percaya, the pronunciation is given as “p’r.CHA.ya”.

So go, and check Quizlet out. Besides Gordon, there are dozens of other users who have created subsets of TIW. I like, for instance, Kate Heffernan’s Passive and Active Voice exercises. They are taken from lesson 94, which, unfortunately, is not mentioned.

Whenever you deal with Quizlet or other application with user-generated content, you need to be aware that the content isn’t always up-to-date or otherwise reliable. As nice as the Quizlet vocabulary cards for The Indonesian Way are, they are based on a previous version of TIW, and do not reflect the current content.

Another minor thing that I don’t like about Quizlet is that it does have an option to listen to the vocabulary word—but only of the English translation. This surprises me because Quizlet says that it supports Indonesian among the 18 supported languages.

Honolulu, 06/02/2019