jmcannon

I used two.

I did all the UX design myself then passed it to the very talented Yoshini who made it pretty.

yoshinig.com

Not right now - I'm sorry. If Anki is perfect for you and you've made all your decks, that's great! Keep using it! If you ever decide to learn another language, we'll be here with a bunch of content ready for you :)

If you sign up on the email form on the front page of cleverdeck.com, I will send something out when we launch an Android version. But that means you'll also be spammed when we launch new languages for iOS. Not ideal - I'll try to add a separate signup somewhere tomorrow.

Thanks! All fixed.

Oh, is there not an email input there? Sorry about that. Feel free to email me at justin@cleverdeck.com.

Really? I'm really sorry about that. We checked those lists so many times.

If you can be bothered, please email me at justin@cleverdeck.com and let me know what you found. We'll push an update fixing any errors ASAP.

hfsktr - I feel you. Managing all your own content in Anki (especially when finding or making your own images) becomes very tedious.

Thanks! I appreciate the nudge. :)

Anki is a spaced repetition app that would allow you to create your own cards for this sort of thing (add arbitrary images to one side of the card).

We wrote in detail about how we picked the words here: http://cleverdeck.com/blog.

Most of the example sentences were hand-picked from tatoeba.org. That covered about 2700 of the words - our teachers wrote the remaining 300 or so.

Sorry, switch native-->target and target-->native in my last paragraph.

You're welcome! :)

In building this app, we didn't survey the research addressing that question specifically (though googling "L1 vs L2 flashcards" pulls up some interesting sites).

For me personally, speaking from 15+ years learning French, Chinese, and Turkish, it's native --> target. Learning that way helps me recall faster when I need to construct my own sentences. If you're looking just to learn to read, I think target --> native is easier and might be a better approach.

I've also had success starting with native --> target to familiarize myself with the word, then quickly switching to target --> native to solidify my ability to produce it on my own.

I agree with you on DuoLingo - great app, not good for vocab learning.

Anki was my main SRS app for many, many years. I didn't like managing all my own lists (and was often buggy). I didn't like the UI. Adding pictures and audio was awkward. It didn't have some basic features like reminders or notifications built-in.

Also, I had to add all my own stuff to Anki. If you want to learn Spanish (for example), we've already done all the work of picking the 3000 words we think you should learn, added high quality images and audio to each one, and gave each an example sentence with translation. I think that's what's most exciting to me.

Haha, right - I was thinking "Brazilian Portuguese."

Though, we will be launching Mexican and Canadian soon as well!

Thank you. That means a lot to me.

Absolutely. All 3000 included cards have native-speaker audio. We recorded it ourselves.

I'm a Turkish teacher! I make podcasts to help people learn Turkish. Supplemental material costs a monthly subscription. It's here: http://turkishteatime.com

Istanbul doesn't generally feel much cheaper than San Francisco, except for rent. I pay $500 to live in a gorgeous apartment with a sea view in downtown Istanbul. That has really added up over time.

I know, I know - I'm sorry. Despite some of the objections, I just think flags do make great language icons. I do understand that complaints, though.

In that particular case, we chose the Brazilian flag because the list and audio is target at Brazilian Portuguese. We should probably explicitly write "Brazilian."

Interestingly, we couldn't find a flag icon for Arabic that was neutral enough. So we just chose the green color from the Arab League flag (which I guess could itself be controversial) and wrote "Arabic" in white text.

Good questions! The free app (there's only one freemium app, actually), has all 3000 words built-in. We charge based on how many you swipe into your deck (i.e. you decide to actively learn). The app comes with a free deck size of 50, then you can increase that incrementally with in-app purchases.

There is a healthy mix of nouns, verbs, adjective, and adverbs.

There isn't currently anyway to add your own content outside of creating individual cards within the app. It's something that I'd like to get to (if people find the SRS system useful, I'd like people to do whatever they want with it).

Yes, when talking about the language learning market, English is the whale. We're going to get there as fast a possible, but it means we'll have to be prepared for everything that comes with having non-English speaking customers.

Though, having an Advanced English deck - so people have good enough English to tell us all the problems we have - sounds like a terrific way to start :)

Thank you! The German list is done and we actually finished recording yesterday. I think we'll be able to release it within a month.

I'll answer!

Check out Anki and Memrise. They, in my opinion, are the best SRS alternatives out there.

Ah man - one of the things I've learned from my launching my first iOS app is how painful it is to answer this question.

Painful because yes, I would LOVE to. Let's see how people like it on iOS, then I can decide the best way to go about getting it in the pipeline as quickly as possible.

Thanks! Right now, we just want to make the best piece of technology possible for learning thousands of words. I don't think grammar is learned very well through flashcards (though, every word does have an example sentence, so you could pick up on some through pattern recognition).

But, for sure, CleverDeck is just one tool in a language learner's toolbox. I have DuoLingo on my phone. It's great. But not ideal for learning tons of vocab.

Oh no, I really hope it doesn't give that impression. I'm open to suggestions on how to avoid that perception.

It's freemium. You can download the full-featured app with a deck size of 50 (also enough to learn just enough words for a short trip for free). If you like it, you can add different increments to the total deck size through in-app purchases: 99 cents for +100, up to 14.99 for 3000.

Didn't mean to be tricky. I thought this was a good way to price it so everyone could try it, tourists could get what they needed for free, and every gradient of language learner could only pay for the amount they needed.

There's a lot to talk about, much of which I wrote about in detail here: http://cleverdeck.com/blog

But to name the big two:

1. I just wanted something I could pull out of my pocket and tell me what to learn. Of course I want to be able to customize it (and you can in CleverDeck), but I found myself spending so much time in the others creating and managing different lists. With CleverDeck, the app is the list. If I don't have time to add words that I'm encountering in the wild, then the app will pull from a default ordering that's sorted by "usefulness."

2. I didn't really like the user experience of others. Too many confidence levels led to cognitive fatigue; I had to tap through menus to find which lists had which number of cards I needed to review. With this, just open it and swipe. It just tells me when cards come up for me to review, and automatically presents 10 new cards the next day (or whatever I have the setting adjusted to).

Shoot - I knew this was going to happen. Sorry about that. I'll go take a look.

Yeah, definitely. Learning languages seems to be the largest use-case for spaced repetition apps, so building in lots of good content for language learning seemed like a smart way to differentiate and target ourselves at first. One of the biggest annoyances I had using the others was how much time I spent building my own decks - when, really, I just wanted to learn common, useful words. It's true that some apps include user-created content you can share, but the quality was pretty hit or miss - and usually didn't come with pre-associated images, sound, and example sentences.

Hey HN - a little background, which might be interesting to some. I went through YC twice, the second time with a company called EveryArt. After working on that for two years as a solo founder, I decided to close it down. I moved from San Francisco to Istanbul and started a niche business (actually, just renamed EveryArt, Inc. in fairness to investors) that has done well enough to support me. I started teaching myself objective C in January to eventually build CleverDeck, which was motivated out of dissatisfaction with the available spaced repetition apps available (Anki, Memrise, etc.) I'll be hanging around if you have any questions. Thanks!