Flashcard Hero Blog

Flashcard Hero now supports Spaced Repetition (aka Leitner System)

2018-07-19T00:00:00+02:00

The Flashcard Hero app now supports the Spaced Repetition learning technique (also known as the Leitner System). Updates are available for all editions of the app: iPhone/iPad, macOS, and Windows 10 devices.

With the recent update, you can now see right away which cards are due today and in the upcoming days. The more often you correctly recall a card, the less often you need to review it. The app takes care of tracking the progress for each card along with its due date.

Should you forget the facts on a card, that card moves back to the start and is scheduled for review again the very next day.

How to use the new Spaced Repetition feature

macOS & Windows:

Click on Progress → Spaced Repetition

iPhone/iPad:

Open a deck
Swipe down on the list of cards to reveal the grouping options above the first card
Tap the box symbol with the two cards sticking out

Case Study: Using Flashcard Hero for Continuous Medical Education

2016-03-18T00:00:00+01:00

Meet Alessandro. He is a medical doctor from Catania (Sicily, Italy) and uses the Flashcard Hero app for his continuous medical education memorizing diagnostic criteria and pharmacological interactions between drugs.

He was kind enough to answer a few questions about how he uses the app in his day to day work.

What is your name and what do you do?
My name is Alessandro and I’m a medical doctor (I just graduated).

What do you use the Flashcard Hero app for?
I use the app to memorize diagnostic criteria and pharmacological interactions between drugs.

Roughly, how many cards did you write and study so far?
It depends. When I have enough time I can study between 50 and 100 cards a day. I write between 10 to 20 cards a day, when I study a new topic.

What has been your biggest success with the app?
The app gives me the possibility to be more precise when I have to prescribe drugs or diagnose a pathology. So it helps day by day.

Do you use the app together with other people?
I’m trying to convince my colleagues that spaced repetition is the greatest way to memorize a lot of information.

What does your typical workflow look like writing cards?
I read my medical books and I highlight with a specific color whatever I consider useful to be memorized. Then I transcribe it to flashcards.

How about studying with the app?
When I’m waiting at the post office to be served or at night before resting I test myself to see if I remember what I have studied during the day.

Do you have any tips for others who are just getting started?
I think it is very important to focus only on what matters. Often medical books show information in tables. I just transcribe the content and than try to memorize it better and better.

Do you use any other tools or study techniques that you can recommend?
Before buying the app I searched Wikipedia for spaced repetition. It’s a very interesting approach that is different from the one I used in the past. After this initial research I wanted to know if the concept had any scientific background, so I searched on PubMed and I found some interesting papers, for example Smolen, 2016 “The right time to learn mechanisms and optimization of spaced learning”. There are many more references in the scientific literature showing the usefulness of that approach.

How to make your own flashcards

2014-06-30T00:00:00+02:00

Flashcards are a great way to memorize facts, wether you are learning a new language, studying for Med school, Psychology, business, law, or any other subject where you have to study and recall lots of facts in a short amount of time.

Because you can take your flashcards along with you, it is easy to study a few cards whenever you have a few moments to spare. Reviewing small pieces of information in short interval is more productive than trying to memorize everything at once.

In this tutorial you will learn how to make flashcards on your Mac and how to memorize them on your Mac, iPhone, or printed on paper.

What a basic flashcard looks like

A typical flash card consists of two parts:

1. The question (can be a word if you are learning a language, an image, a sentence, etc.)
2. The answer (the part that you want to memorize, again, a word, image, sentence, etc.)

For traditional paper flashcards, you write the question on the front of the card and the answer on the back side. In case of the Flashcard Hero app that we’ll use, the question goes at the top, the answer at the bottom of the card.

Let’s get started writing the first cards

Download the free Flashcard Hero app from the Mac App Store here
Open the Flashcard Hero app (you can find it in LaunchPad or in your “Applications” folder)
Click the “Add new deck” button
Now type a question into the “Question” field of the card
Add the answer below in the “Answer” field

Study the flashcards on your Mac

The Flashcard Hero app has a built-in study mode to learn your new flashcards. Just click on the blue “Study” button in the lower right of the app.

You’ll see the question part of the card with the answer covered. Try to recall the answer now.
Click on the cover card to reveal the answer. Now you can tell if you remembered it correctly.
Rate how well you remembered the card (easy, unsure, hard).

By rating your cards you can later sort your cards and study only those that you do not know yet (or those that proved to be tricky to learn).

Print the flashcards

If you would like to print your flashcards, rather than studying them on your Mac or iPhone, you can do so with the paid version of the app that you can get either directly from within the free version or the Mac App Store. You can find detailed instructions for double-sided printing here.

Studying on the iPhone/iPad

The Flashcard Hero app is also available for iPhone and iPad from the App Store. To transfer your cards through iCloud to your iPhone you’ll have to use the paid version of the Mac app that you can get either directly through the free version of as separate download from the Mac App Store.

A trick to better remember facts you’ve learned

Once you learned the first few cards, you won’t have to revisit those each time you study. However, to not completely forget the cards, you should include them again after a little while.

The good news is that each time you reviewed a card and found it easy, you can wait a little longer before you review the card. Over time the facts will be anchored deeply in your memory, requiring only very infrequent reviews.

This process is called Spaced Repetition and was described by the German science journalist Sebastian Leitner as Leitner System in the 1970s.

Flashcard Hero iPhone app now available on the App Store

2014-04-28T00:00:00+02:00

Studying your flashcards on the go is now possible with the new Flashcard Hero iPhone app.

Your cards are transferred between your Mac and iPhone though iCloud. As you study and rate cards, your study progress is updated in the Mac app automatically.

You can download the Flashcard Hero iPhone app on the App Store here.

Interview: Tommy Zai on teaching English in China

2014-01-04T00:00:00+01:00

Tommy Zai is a certified English as a Second Language (ESL) teacher and licensed psychotherapist working with “at risk” teens in an under-developed area of China. He got in touch asking for a free Flashcard Hero license to use in his classroom. Along with a free license I sent him a few questions to learn more about his life in China.

Q&A with Tommy Zai

What is your background and what do you do?

After high school I worked as a hair designer to help pay for my college education. During this time I also wrote and produced music. I received my BA in English from State University of New York at Stony Brook. I studied overseas at Saint Patrick's Teacher's College for my final year of that degree in an exchange program.

One of my professors needed someone to housesit for his home in Santa Barbara, California for the summer. I soon after fell in love with Southern California and made that my home. I attended Antioch University in Santa Barbara and received my MA degree in clinical psychology. I worked for several non-profit agencies helping adults with serious mental disabilities.

How did you end up in China?

During my time in Southern California I made friends all over the world, online. One of my friends lived in Guangdong, China. I visited for a couple weeks, and during that time I met another American, who was teaching English at a training center. He invited me to his class. I introduced myself to the students and began entertaining and teaching them. It came naturally to me.

The principal of the school offered me a job. A couple years later, when my work grant ended, I decided to take the offer to teach in China. Since 2005, I have been teaching at least one semester per year in Guangdong and Guanxi provinces.

Who are the kids that you teach?

I have taught many age groups, but the most challenging and rewarding have been the “troubled teens”. They are in school to learn English, but in truth they need more help with life-skills and learning right from wrong. They come from a variety of backgrounds, many of which are poor, yet some are very rich and “spoiled”.

What does a typical day look like?

In the beginning, I worked all day and night, teaching, teaching, teaching. But, I was getting run-down and sick with sore throats. For the sake of my voice, I reduced my classes. I found the best schedule to be 10am - 2pm. That gave me time to wake up in the morning and time to prepare the next day's lessons in the afternoon (and time to socialize and sing karaoke)

How do you use Flashcard Hero?

Flashcard Hero is a great way to make learning fun for students. I create games and contests, often dividing the class in half and having them compete for answering questions. The cards are “turned over” to reveal the correct answer. In small classes and after hours groups, I can display Flashcard Hero on my MacBook, but for larger classes I need to use a projector.

What is challenging about what you do?

The most difficult thing for me is staying healthy. The air quality is terrible over there. I'm often fighting a sore throat. The teaching can be challenging, but in truth – at the risk of sounding overconfident – it comes natural to me and I enjoy it.

What is most rewarding?

Bringing a dead class to life. Finding creative ways to keep students excited about learning – like using Flashcard Hero!

What do you do for fun outside work?

Karaoke, shopping, traveling, and playing table tennis.

What tips do you have for people to do what you do?

I think anyone and everyone should experience living and working in a foreign country. Just be sure to keep your immune system strong!

Where can people learn more about what you do and maybe follow your footsteps?

There are many online agencies recruiting foreign teachers. They prefer native English speakers, but there are also other opportunities. Last year I worked in Guangxi. This year I plan to return to Guangdong. The exact site/location/school is yet to be determined, although I will probably return to the vocational high school where it all began.

Again, thank you Tommy for taking the time to answer the questions. It is inspiring to see somebody taking action and making a difference in people's lives!

Big update: print cards, better formulas, study both ways, and more

2013-11-29T00:00:00+01:00

Version 1.4 of Flashcard Hero adds 5 of the most requested features. Let's jump right in!

Printing flashcards

You can now print your decks via the File > Print menu. The cards will be arranged for double-sided printing. Depending on your printer the individual steps might be slightly different, but in general you'll want to:

Print the odd pages first (the question sides)
Take the printed pages and put them back into the paper input tray (depending on your printer you may have to rotate/flip the stack)
Now print the even pages only (the answer sides)

Before you print a deck with hundreds of cards, create a new test deck with 5 cards and print this one first so that you can figure out exactly how you have to input the paper for your printer model.

If you run into trouble printing on both sides, get in touch (don't forget to include your printer model in your message).

Switch question and answer while studying

For all of you who are studying languages: you can now study the reverse combination of your vocabulary cards. The study mode now has an option to switch question and answer.

Sub/superscript for better formulas

With the latest update, H₂O and a² + b² = c² are no strangers anymore. You can find the menu under Format > Font > Baseline.

Multi-level lists

Many people asked for a better way to structure facts. You can now indent lists by pressing the TAB key (Shift TAB for the opposite direction).

Copy & paste screenshots

You can now copy and paste screenshots and other images directly into your cards. Quick tip: to create a screenshot of a part of the screen, press Command (⌘)-Shift-4.

Along with the new features, the latest update comes with an number of smaller improvements. You can see the complete list in the Updates section of the Mac App Store.

How to video: sharing flashcards with others

2013-10-29T00:00:00+01:00

Here is a short demonstration how to share your flashcards with others. Sharing was introduced with version 1.3 (free update in the Mac App Store).

Share flashcards online with the new Flashcard Hero update

2013-10-25T00:00:00+02:00

The biggest new feature in version 1.3 of Flashcard Hero is the ability to share flashcards with your friends online.

In the top right corner you will notice a new "share" icon to upload your cards to the web and to see everything you have shared so far.

Each shared deck gets a unique link, like this one flashcardhero.com/c/ZMf7jvTNqz, that you can share with others.

Here is an example of what it looks like in your browser:

Downloading a shared deck back into the app is also pretty straight forward. Click on the green "Study with Flashcard Hero" button: the app opens and begins downloading automatically.

Other download formats are also available. You can, for example, download all cards as tab-separated text files (without images & formatting) or you can view the cards as printable notes.

As usual, you can install the update from the Mac App Store:

Mac App Store