Guide to flashcards

Introduction

Flashcards are a popular way to learn words when you are trying to learn a foreign language. Also, it might be a great way to pass time while waiting for a bus or for an appointment. Flashcard will display the question. You think of an answer for yourself, and after you click the card, you will see the answer, and you will be able to verify if you were right or not. Flashcards don't impact the "know" word counter.

Overview

When you click on Flashcards in the menu, a page for flashcards will open.

What you see in this screenshot is a simple question that asks for the meaning of a German word. When you click on a card, an answer will be shown. And this is the whole flashcard principle.

Even though flashcards are a simple tool that can help you learn foreign languages, these flashcards are configurable and targeted for the German language. If you click on the button "Settings", you will be able to configure your flashcards.

The first thing you can select is the source of the words. You can display flashcards for B1 nouns, verbs and adjectives along with other words. The list of these words is published by the Goethe Institute, and the document with these words can be found on this web page (the document from the Goethe Institute has no translations to English).

Another option is to have your own words from your own dictionary used as a source for flashcards. This option is available, of course, if you are logged in. You can also select the time frame, so only words modified in the selected time frame will be used.

The next option is the test type. The basic level of understanding a foreign language is to recognize the meaning of a foreign word. This is the lowest level of understanding a foreign language. Much more challenging is guessing a German word from its English counterpart.
With that in mind, you can choose "Easy" to have a question card display a German word, asking for a meaning in English.
You can choose "Hard" to have a question card display an English word, asking for a word in German.
"Medium" is, as you guess, somewhere in between. It is like "Hard", but with hints. Parts of the answer are displayed and you can also see the number of letters in the answer. I believe that this is a pretty nice way to learn words and practice your vocabulary.

One of the things that flashcards display when using nouns is the gender of a noun. The gender is displayed as the color of the flashcard. It might help some people to visually associate a noun's gender with the noun. If you think that this isn't helpful for you, you can disable the color of the flashcards by checking the last checkbox in the settings panel.