Arabic 02

I’m using Anki as well as cardboard flashcards. The earlier Anki one was already a bit distanced from the paradigm of the two sided flashcard: If you think of a flat piece of cardboard – you just naturally have to look at either one side of it or the other. With Anki (one) the usual basic pattern was that the first side would stay in view when you pressed “show answer”. The “answer” just appeared underneath the question. Thus, in ANKI, you finish by effectively looking at both sides of the “card” simultaneously.

Another difference was that with cardboard – the two two-sided nature of physical flashcards is symmetrical. So you might deliberately organise them by storing them in a particular orientation but the cards themselves don’t resist being looked at the wrong way round. Eg first “Answer” and then “question”. Anki allowed the user to stipulate either two or one directional cards.

Anki two has moved further away from the idea of the flashcard as being the basic unit – ie a two sided thing. Now the design assumes that people might have multidimensionally linked information that they what to reflect in different ways. They will add a NOTE – which might have more fields in it (that’s to say categories of information) than are actually reflected in particular cards.

The note will have particular format (a series of named “fields” like – Arabic written letter, pronunciation recording, transcription of the name using latin letters etc.) – anki calls this a type. The way to make a new type is to start with one of the “types” you already have. The steps go like this:
start the process of adding a note. At the top of the screen you see two pull down menus: type and deck. In both cases you can either choose one of the existing options or add a new one.

Of course a big plus of the computerised flashcard is that the “cards” can contain photographs, audio or even video recordings.