Quick update:-
I'm near the end of the drama "My Holo Love" (나 홀로 그대) with Korean audio-description and Spanish subs. I hate when you see the writer's hand in a story moving the threads that should be invisible and forcing a character to do something for the sake of the plot instead of because it makes sense within the story. And that's exactly what I feel has been happening with one of the characters in this drama and it just takes me out from the story. It's breaking the verisimilitude and it's making it hard for me to "believe" what's happening or even feel interested about it. This situation was bothering me so much that while I was in the middle of episode 10 I decided to just jump to episode 12 to watch the end and be done with the drama. Not sure if I want to go back to watch the episode and a half I skipped.
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I had been thinking of using Memrise/Decks to review vocabulary from my Korean classes, but it seems the Memrise app doesn't work with users' created courses anymore and I wasn't able to find an Android app for "Decks". Fortunately, I found another option called "Memorion" and felt pleasantly surprised.I'm usually not much into using flashcards apps but, when I did try to use them, I usually preferred Memrise over Anki just because it felt more gamified and fun to do. I was initially afraid I wouldn't be able to find a gamified app like Memrise, but Memorion seems to be a lot better in that area and it also seems to allow a lot of customization to the cards and the quizzes.
Memorion is completely free and ads free also. It comes with three "modes": Beginner, Advanced and Expert. Each mode allows more flexibility and customization than the previous one but is also, of course, more complex.
The app recommends to start with the "Beginner" mode, so that you get familiar with the basics first. It allows you to generate a premade deck of some language pairs. I wanted to generate one with Korean or Japanese but neither of them were available, so I went with "Chinese". It automatically created a big Chinese-Spanish deck with sub-decks for different topics (like greetings, numbers, etc.). There were actually two big decks: one with Chinese first and Spanish second and the other with Spanish first and Chinese sencond which made it so that you could get asked in both directions (Chinese to Spanish and Spanish to Chinese).
When you don't know a word, instead of having to choose an option called "I don't know", you need to choose an option called "Play". Then, at the end of the quiz you get asked those words again but as a multiple-choice question. If you get it wrong you have to play the multiple choice questions until you get it right. If you get it right, then you are asked about the word in the normal non-multiple-choice way again and if you get it right it gets scheduled to be studied/quizzed again in 15 minutes.
Apart from the "Learn" area, there's also a "Play" area that seems to be independent from the SRS of the cards. Here you can choose among different games like:
- Match 'em
- Pick One
- Listen Up
- Memory
- Number Me
- Pick Gender
- Type It
- Spell Me
- Hang 'Em
- Just Listen
I had lots of fun within this area!!!
After I felt satisfied and excited enough about the app, I decided to move up a level and try the "Advanced" mode. I imported an Excel file I had created for one of my Memrise/Decks courses. This was with the Korean-English pair and within the app I could also easily create a mirror deck with English-Korean so that I could learn/practice in both directions. I didn't have sound files for this deck, but the app is able to use text-to-speech voices if you have downloaded them, so I can actually have sound for every word without having to look for and upload individual sound files for each one.
Memorion allows you to import decks from different sources (not only Excel and Word files, but also decks from Anki and Memrise/Decks and a lot more). It also lets you decide how many new cards you want to get activated each day (from 0 to 20, I think). As I've had bad experiences with Anki before, I decided to set it to 0 new cards per day and instead I activate new cards whenever I want to (there's an option for that too and you can choose from 2, 5, 10 and 20 if I remember right).
After playing for a while in the "Advanced" mode I finally decided to move up to the "Expert" mode. It has A LOT of features and possibilities. I'm still exploring it. One of my favorites so far is the option to handwrite/draw the answers to the quizzes on the screen. I'm sure more experienced flashcards users can get really creative with all the options available.
