There are flash card programs that will present you with the cards at intervals that correspond to how our memories work, and they come in both free and low cost versions. I examined three programs that seem to be widely used. I will do reviews soon on each one of these, with screenshots:
- the free Mnemosyne (for Windows, Mac, and Linux), basic but effective.
- Anki , also free (for Windows, Mac, Debian/Ubuntu Linux, iphone/iPod, Zaurus, and Windows Mobile) with more features than Mnemosyne.
- VTrain, around $24 US with a free trial period (for Windows, which can also run on Mac or Linux by using programs which emulate Windows, like Wine). I ended up with this one for myself.
I’m a bit of a software fanatic, and enjoy picking the best tool for the job. In the case of a program to increase Spanish vocabulary via flash cards, choosing the best program for you may make the difference between using it heavily, casually, or not at all… with results to match in your language skills.
Programs I didn’t check out fully
If you are on a Mac, here is a full-featured commercial program I didn’t check out since I am on Windows: http://www.loopware.com/iflash/
I also quickly checked a couple of Windows programs in the $40 US range, WinFlash Educator, and Stackz, but I am not going to review them as I felt VTrain was better for the purpose of learning Spanish vocabulary. They both had appealing features, though, and the WinFlash family had a couple of lower priced versions. You can easily find these by searching in Google or your favorite search engine.
There are also websites where you can do flash cards, but I didn’t explore them much. I prefer a program that resides on my computer. Also, the one flash card website I looked at had too simple a way of reviewing your flash cards.
So What Do You Need In a Spanish Flash Card Program?
As I worked with the programs and saw what they could do, I came up with a list of what mattered to me. Your list might be a little different.
- Ease of use, both in entering vocabulary and in studying it
- Ability to type Spanish characters into the program when adding vocabulary: ¿ á é í ó and others
- Option when reviewing vocabulary to type in the item if I wanted to
- Ability of the software to sort the cards, according to some indication I would give about how well I knew them… and then to present them to me again on an appropriate schedule. Thus the ones I knew well wouldn’t turn up for a long time while the ones I was shaky on would come up soon.
This scheduling feature is a real benefit of using such a program rather than the physical-cards-in-a-shoebox method. I still have my box sitting right next to my desk, but I think it may become history very soon.
Recommended Resources
After I do reviews of those three programs, I will come back and link to them from this page. If you want to get my weekly email newsletter that updates you on new articles on the blog, just sign up for my free ebook in the upper right corner of this page.
Mnemosyne is at http://www.mnemosyne-proj.org/
Anki is at http://ichi2.net/anki/ and do notice that there are several nice short videos that explain it.
VTrain is at http://www.vtrain.net/home.htm Since I am starting to use it myself, I’m going to write both a review and an article explaining the basics of its use.
Since reviewing what we have learned is essential for it to move from short-term to long-term memory, I think that a Spanish flash card program is a really important tool in anyone’s practice and learning Spanish.
