These Are the Best Flashcard Apps for Studying

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Making your own flashcards can be tedious, but they’re such a great study tool that it would be a shame to let that stop you from using them. Although there are major retention benefits to writing information down by hand, busy learners don’t always have time—so here are some solid online options for making and using flashcards.

The benefits of flashcards for studying

First, it’s important to understand why you want to use flashcards to study, let alone why some apps and services are better suited to this task than others. Repeatedly quizzing yourself can entrench the content of the flashcards into your brain, since you have to use the process of active recall to retrieve the information from your short- or long-term memory when you see a prompt. You can mix up your active recall strategies by blurting, which means saying or writing down everything you can remember from your materials before checking your notes, or using the Feynman technique, which involves “teaching” the content to someone else—even if it’s just ChatGPT. But for now, let’s focus on flashcards.

The best way to make your material stick in your brain is to use the Leitner method, a kind of spaced repetition, and flashcards are what make that possible. With this technique, you sort your flashcards into about five piles (though you can have more or less depending on how much time stands between you and your test) as you review them, moving them up a pile or down a pile depending on if you get an answer right or wrong. Over time, you’ll be able to review the cards in the higher-up piles less frequently, since you grasp their contents, and you’ll review cards in the lower-down piles more often, since you’re struggling with them.

Not only will you waste less time drilling material you know, you’ll force your brain to etch it into your long-term memory so you can retrieve it on the rare instances you do go over those cards. A lot of the apps below actually use the Leitner method or a version of spaced repetition to automatically show you cards you’re struggling with more often, which is what makes them so useful. That said, you still need to study those less-frequent cards; that’s a process called overlearning and it will help you retain the information for a lot longer.

The apps below were chosen for a few reasons. First, I picked ones that make flashcard generation easy. Second, I selected ones that, to some extent or another, rely on the Leitner method and give you the option to indicate whether you got a card right or wrong.

The best flashcard apps

There are some great, easy-to-use sites that allow you to create flashcard decks online, then use those virtual decks to study.

For finding pre-made flashcards: Brainscape

Credit: Lindsey Ellefson

In my full review of Brainscape, I gave it five stars. I truly like this one. I’m actually using it actively right now to study for a certification exam I have coming up.

Brainscape gives you the option to make your own flashcards, but also to search for decks made by other learners—and even the option to access decks that have been approved by credentialing bodies for things like standardized tests, entry exams, and certification tests. It’s ideal for everyone from SAT preppers to lifelong learners like me and the variety of material on there is endless. I’ve even used it to study random things just because I have an interest in learning something new. Best of all, I’ve never had to create a deck. Whatever I want is already in there.

The free-account option allows you to use text, while the paid version lets you add images and sounds, do more advanced editing, study an unlimited amount, import materials, copy other users’ flashcards into your files, and see learning stats. One month of Brainscape is $19.99, six months cost $59.94, a year is $95.88, and a lifetime membership is $199.99. For what it’s worth, I’ve been using the free version for months and am doing just fine.

Using your phone? Here’s the iOS version and the Android version.

For simplicity: Cram

Credit: Lindsey Ellefson

Sometimes, all you need or want is the simplest flashcard deck, with cards that have a front and back and can be used for quizzing. Cram is so easy to use and it works great in its free version (although $29.99 per month gets you access to a few extra features, like customization of your card formatting).

Read my full review here, but the basics are these: You get plain, white cards that the site displays either as traditional flashcards, a matching game with drop-down menus, or classic computer games (a jewel-matching game and a space shooting game) that pull your flashcard information into them. Besides the flashy games, there are no unnecessary frills here. Enter the information onto the cards and study. It’s that easy.

Download the apps: iOS is here and Android is here.

To add pictures: Quizlet

Credit: Lindsey Ellefson

There are a number of flashcard generators that let you use pictures, but the pricing on many of them is weirdly opaque. Quizlet, a popular studying platform you’re probably already familiar with if you’ve ever taken an online class and tried to Google your homework questions, allows you to create flashcards (with pictures!), browse other people’s flashcards, and take practice quizzes—and the pricing for getting rid of ads and studying an unlimited amount is straightforward: You pay $35.99 per year or $7.99 per month. You can import existing data, from Word or Excel, too, to create the flashcards even faster. In my review of this one, I did give it five stars because you can also use your account to access practice quizzes and games, plus it’s been around for so long it’s basically the gold standard for students. Like others on this list, it functions fine in the free version, which is why it made my list of best free studying apps, too.

Download for your iPhone here and your Android here.

For quick flashcard generation: Flashcard lab

Credit: Lindsey Ellefson

If you want to make fast flashcards and you use Google’s free suite of productivity apps (namely Google Sheets), you should use Flashcard Lab. As I explain in my full review, it’s not flashy. All it is, at its core, is a simple way to quickly turn content from Google Sheets into flashcards. Column A is the front of the card, Column B produces the back, and that’s about it—but it’s great if all you need is some fast cards. If you’re truly in a rush, you can upload class materials to ChatGPT and ask the AI to create a downloadable .xls file with questions and answers, then open it in Sheets and go from there. Truly, using this one couldn’t be easier or less labor intensive.

Available on iOS and Android, as well as through a Chrome extension, you can use it for free to study 600 GRE vocab words, review or print up to 20 flashcards per deck, add up to five images per deck, and manually add cards to a “forgotten” set for re-review. A one-time payment of $10.99 bumps you up to the “Elite” tier, which gives you access to some extra features, like the ability to toggle on spaced repetition or randomized review.

For learning a foreign language: DuoCards

Credit: Lindsey Ellefson

There are two apps I recommend for learning a foreign language and they are Repeet and DuoCards. In a head-to-head comparison, I did pick DuoCards because its extra features edged out Repeet ever so slightly, but the long and short of it is that both of them have automatic translation features that allow you to quickly generate cards in-app or via Chrome extension.

Repeet works on iOS, Android, or Chrome extension. Same for DuoCards: iOS, Android, or Chrome extension. DuoCards has a mini game and an AI chatbot designed to help you immerse yourself in the language more than just using the cards will, whereas Repeet is just flashcard-based, but the features will cost you. Where Repeet is absolutely usable and excellent in its free version, DuoCards’ free version only allows 20 cards in your “to learn” category and just 10 opportunities to ask your chatbot a question. If you pay $33 for three months or $64.90 for the year, you get rid of the ads, access unlimited flashcards, and can chat nonstop with the AI bot. If mini games and immersion are important to you, pick DuoCards. If you just want flashcards or don’t want to spend money, Repeet works well.

Bonus: Google’s NotebookLM

Credit: Google

If you read a lot of my studying content, you know I’m a fiend for NotebookLM. If you don’t read a lot of my studying content, I’ll tell you why: This free resource is an AI chatbot that pulls only from materials you provide. That means you upload your slide decks, notes, links, videos, and PDFs from class and the answers it gives you will only come from those. I’ve seen ChatGPT make wild mistakes with homework, largely because it can and will pull from all over the Internet, so there’s some safety baked in here.

NotebookLM can do a few things that help you study. It can summarize your materials or outline a paper, like any chatbot, but it can also produce a fake podcast of people discussing your materials, generate flashcards, and prepare you a practice quiz. In everything it provides, NotebookLM hyperlinks back to the exact section in your materials where it got that content, so if you get a flashcard or quiz question wrong, you can quickly find where the question came from and reread it. It’s free to use, but the drawback is that it doesn’t Leitner-ify the flashcards.

Access it in a browser through the website or via app on iOS and Android.

Original Source: https://lifehacker.com/best-flashcard-study-apps?utm_medium=RSS