Anki

 

Anki is a highly customizable flashcard program that uses spaced repetition to help you memorize things more efficiently than normal flashcards. The theory of spaced repetition is based on the idea that the best time to review information is right before you are about to forget it. When you repeatedly get a card correct, the card gradually appears less often. Cards you struggle with appear more often. For example a card you struggle with might show up once every couple of days, while a card you know well may only show up once every three months.

This method of spaced repetition makes the app extremely popular among people who need to remember a ton of information over a long period of time, such as medical students and language learners. Using physical flashcards with this much information would be unwieldy or even impossible, as many language learners may have as many as ten thousand cards by the time they reach fluency.

Anki is free and open source, meaning it is extremely customizable. For the majority of us that don't plan on digging into the source code though, there are thousands of community made add-ons. These include both simple cosmetic changes and much more involved additions such as the popular Japanese support add-on that automatically generates furigana and pitch-accent information. This app is easy to use but it is extremely powerful if you want to really dig into customizing it to be optimal for you.

Personally, I have been using Anki to help me learn Spanish. I have my decks for Spanish split into two categories, one for Spanish class and one for studying on my own time. My Spanish class flash cards are simple cards with a vocabulary word on one side and its English translation on the other. For independent study, I use the "sentence mining" strategy. When I'm consuming Spanish-language media and encounter a sentence with one word I don't know, I put that entire sentence on the front of the card and the English meaning of the one word I don't know on the back. This lets me learn words in context rather than in isolation, which I find makes it easier to learn the language.

Overall, I would highly recommend Anki to everyone who needs to memorize lots of information. It is free on Widnows, Mac, Linux, and Android, but the IOS app costs $25. That is a pretty steep price for a moble app, but you can also access the web version for free if you want to try it out. Anki makes studying so easy and efficient that it has made regular flashcards obsolete to me.