Fáilte!

Recently I’ve been taking Gaeilge lessons at City Lit. It’s wonderful, but boy it is hard to remember everything.

One thing I’ve found fantastically useful is the app Anki. It’s a spaced-repetition flash-card app, similar to Duolingo, except you can make your own cards about anything you like, and it’s not trying to squeeze money out of you with a subscription. It works on both computers and on mobile. To use the iPhone version you have to buy it first, but all the other versions are completely free.

The app doesn’t come with any built-in content, you have to add that yourself. After each lesson at City Lit I’ve been making my own Anki cards from my notes, and using these to revise. Once I have a little free time I’ll clean them up and publish them for others to use too.

Anki also has an online library of decks made and kindly shared by other people, again free-of-charge. If you create an account and log-in you can download them and add them to your app. There’s decks for all manner of topics. Here’s some of my favourite Gaeilge decks that I have tried:

• Irish 1k, based on the classic soap opera Ros na Rún! It has audio for (almost) all the words, which is very helpful.
• Na hÉin (Birds in Irish/As Gaeilge), with which I’m learning English names for birds too.
• Na Plandaí (Plants in Irish/As Gaeilge), which is the same but for plants.
• Irish sentences bank (Pota Focal House Glossary).
• Irish CEFR B1 Phrases, Vocabulary, and Pronunciation, which has audio, so long as you have an internet connection. It also has a particularly egregious lime green background, for some reason.

My favourite is Irish 1k, for the audio pronunciation.

Tips

I like to add cards on my laptop and study on my phone, typically while on the train or such. If you’re logged in on multiple devices it’ll keep your notes and your progress in sync between them.

You can change how many never-before-seen cards it adds to your to-view pile each day. If it’s too easy or too hard you can turn this number up or down. If you’ve got totally overwhelmed by the workload you can “reset” cards to take them out pile altogether. For the deck I’ve made with my revision notes I keep the number very high, while for the decks from the internet I keep the number very low, and try to aim for 80-90% accuracy (which is visible in the “stats” tab of the app).

In Anki’s settings you can enable the “FSRS algorithm”. I don’t really understand how it works, but it changes how Anki decides how often to show you each card, supposedly to improve memorisation. It was recommended to me by someone from the Anki community online, and it does seem to help.

Ádh mór!