Today is Valentine’s Day, which is a popular occasion to celebrate love. I love free software. In case you don’t know: Free software is software that respects our freedom, and I suggest that you take a close look.
Today I’d like to recommend a pair of nifty, lovely Android apps that I use on a regular basis to improve my vocabulary, namely AnkiDroid with QuickDic. (Needless to say, both are available via F-Droid, an alternative app store that provides nothing but free software.)
AnkiDroid is a tool to memorize things based on flashcards, organized in decks. In a nutshell, you create cards with different contents on back and front, AnkiDroid presents one side of a card, and you try to recall the other, telling AnkiDroid how easy it was to recall the matching content. The frequency of how often a single card’s side is presented is determined by a so-called spaced repetition algorithm. Essentially, the better you know a card, the less frequently it is presented. Lots of card decks are available on the Web and can be imported into AnkiDroid. I don’t use that feature, however.
Instead, I use AnkiDroid with the offline dictionary app QuickDic, which offers dictionaries for lots of (pairs of) languages. Whenever I look up an intriguing word or phrase in QuickDic, I long-press that dictionary entry to invoke a share dialog. Selecting AnkiDroid in that dialog creates a pre-filled flashcard in AnkiDroid, which just needs minor tweaking to create a new card. Learning vocabulary has never been simpler.
I love free software.