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What are Anki Flashcards?

Anki, derived from the Japanese word meaning ‘to memorise,’ is not only a term but also a powerful application designed to aid in the memorisation process. With Anki, you can effectively memorise a wide range of information, including vocabulary items. This program revolutionises the way we remember things by offering an efficient alternative to traditional study methods. As a result, you have the option to significantly reduce the time spent studying while simultaneously increasing the amount of information you retain. Anki flashcards incorporate spaced repetition, further enhancing the effectiveness of the learning experience.

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.

How Anki works

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!

By utilising Anki, you can ensure long-term retention of the vocabulary you’ve learned. Furthermore, Anki allows for customisation according to your preferences. For example, you can limit the number of vocabulary items to no more than 20 or allocate a specific duration, such as 10 minutes per day, which can be extended if you have additional time available. This flexibility enables you to tailor your learning experience to suit your needs.

The Anki spaced repetition flashcards provide various statistics related to your learned vocabulary. It offers great flexibility in terms of card layout and review timing. You can use Anki to learn either Indonesian to English or vice versa. Additionally, Anki supports audio, so the words are not just displayed but also spoken by a native speaker. Thousands of words have been recorded for you to enhance your learning experience. Moreover, you have the option to switch off the text display and solely listen to the items.

Anki is a highly versatile application that is compatible with a wide range of platforms, making it extremely convenient for vocabulary learning. Whether you find yourself waiting for the bus or taking a quick coffee break, you can easily access Anki on your smartphone to improve your vocabulary skills. You can use Anki on various operating systems, including Android, iOS (iPhones), Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X, allowing you to seamlessly integrate it into your preferred device or operating system. This flexibility ensures that you can make the most of Anki’s features regardless of your chosen platform.

Anki is (mostly) free

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. 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.

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

Many Indonesians are confused: which is the correct spelling: photo, foto, or poto. In fact we can find all three variants. The official spelling is foto, but, as many Indonesians cannot pronounce the sound /f/, the word is often rendered in pronunciation, but also in spelling as poto. The spelling photo mimics English usage, but is wrong.

English has a number of redundant letters or letter combinations (graphemes), and English is also a very conservative languages in regards to its spelling system. Many English words are still spelled the way they were pronounced hundreds of years ago, and words of Greek origins often still reflect their original Greek spelling.

The fact that the word ‘character’ is written with the grapheme ch (and not with the letter K) is because in Greek it is written χαρακτήρ where the first letter is the letter Chi (χ). For the same reason is the word ‘myth’ written with the grapheme th because it is derived from Greek μῦθοι where the third letter is the letter Theta (θ) – which is not pronounced like th in English. And then are the numerous English words that contain the grapheme ph because they are based on the Greek letter Phi (φ) such as phantasy which is derived from Greek φαντασία.

The phoneme-grapheme correspondences of Chi, Theta and Phi in English are as follows: Chi is represented by the grapheme ch which corresponds to the phoneme (sound) /k/ (character, Christ, chiropractic). Theta is represented by the grapheme th, and is pronounced /th/ (myth, theology, pathology). Phi is represented by the grapheme ph which corresponds to the phoneme /f/ (phase, phonetics, orthography).

In many European languages the phoneme-grapheme correspondences of Chi, Theta and Phi differ from English. Among European languages the dental fricative /th/ is only known in English, Spanish, and Greek. Therefore the Theta will in most European languages be pronounced /t/. As many European languages also have a much more modern orthography (spelling system) as compared to English, a word such as ‘theology’ which is derived from Greek θεος and λογος (theos [God] and logos [word, teaching]) is in Danish, Norwegian, Swedish, spelled teologi, and in Hungarian, Italian, Polish, Portuguese, and Spanish teologia.

While in English the grapheme ph is always used to render the Greek letter phi (φ) as in philosophy, telephone, paragraph, photo, graphite, and phenomenon other European languages render the Phi phonetically as /f/. In Dutch, for instance, the same words are written filosofie, telefoon, paragraaf, foto, grafiet, and fenomeen—a double vowel indicates that the vowel is long.

Greek words were introduced into the Indonesian language through Dutch and not English, and hence they closely resemble their Dutch counterparts: filosofi, telepon, paragraf, foto, grafit, and fenomena.

You may have noticed that Dutch ‘telefoon’ is not spelled with an /f/ but with a /p/. This is because the Malay language from which Indonesian is derived does not know the phoneme /f/, which in many cases is rendered as /p/: pikir (think) and paham (understand) from Arabic ‘fikr’ and ‘fahm’, kopi (coffee) from Dutch ‘koffie’, etc.

So, can you conclude that when you have words of Greek origin containing ch, ph, and th, the corresponding Indonesian word is always spelled similar to the English word, but with k instead of ch, f instead of ph, and t instead of th? This is indeed often the case. But not always: blasphemy (from Greek βλάσφημος) is penodaan agama and not *blasfemi.

28-12-2018