Babel Flashcards - the PhD student's new friend
A PhD student named Drayton Benner contacted me recently about his new flashcard software application for Mac and PC. I was happy to check it out, and am happy to let others know what I think of the program, Babel Flashcards.
As with any application, there are pros and cons. Let me get the cons out of the way.
1. Unless I simply overlooked it, there is no way for you to create your own cards, nor edit existing cards. You are limited to the decks made specifically for this application.
2. PC users don't care about interface too much, but Mac users do. It isn't very Mac-like.
3. In the age of multimedia, it's nice to be able to add audio to the cards if a user wants. No such ability here.
4. No mobile app. I do the majority of my flashcard studying on my iPhone nowadays.
Now the pros. I can see this program being just great for PhD students living and breathing the biblical languages. Each card has important metadata attached to them— frequency, part of speech, and location. Users can create derivative decks using this metadata. So, create yourself a deck of all verbs and nouns in the book of James that occur 30 times or less. Or make a deck to quiz yourself on all adjectives in Hosea. The sky's the limit. This is pretty powerful stuff. The only other Flashcard program like it is Ken Penner's Flash! Pro. The difference between Babel and Flash! Pro is compatibility with both Mac and PC. Also, with Babel you can just choose the Greek deck for a lower cost, whereas Flash! Pro includes everything automatically.
I hope some students out there find Babel Flashcards useful. It is a well written app. I've also added it to my flashcard roundup page.
As with any application, there are pros and cons. Let me get the cons out of the way.
1. Unless I simply overlooked it, there is no way for you to create your own cards, nor edit existing cards. You are limited to the decks made specifically for this application.
2. PC users don't care about interface too much, but Mac users do. It isn't very Mac-like.
3. In the age of multimedia, it's nice to be able to add audio to the cards if a user wants. No such ability here.
4. No mobile app. I do the majority of my flashcard studying on my iPhone nowadays.
Now the pros. I can see this program being just great for PhD students living and breathing the biblical languages. Each card has important metadata attached to them— frequency, part of speech, and location. Users can create derivative decks using this metadata. So, create yourself a deck of all verbs and nouns in the book of James that occur 30 times or less. Or make a deck to quiz yourself on all adjectives in Hosea. The sky's the limit. This is pretty powerful stuff. The only other Flashcard program like it is Ken Penner's Flash! Pro. The difference between Babel and Flash! Pro is compatibility with both Mac and PC. Also, with Babel you can just choose the Greek deck for a lower cost, whereas Flash! Pro includes everything automatically.
I hope some students out there find Babel Flashcards useful. It is a well written app. I've also added it to my flashcard roundup page.
Labels: Aramaic, flashcards, Greek, Hebrew
posted by Danny Zacharias at
8:03 AM
1 Comments:
Thanks, Danny, for the review of Babel Flashcards. We were trying to accomplish the following distinctives in creating this flashcard application for Biblical Greek, Biblical Hebrew, and Biblical Aramaic. (You can find a fuller description of these features with screenshots at http://www.miklalsoftware.com/BabelFlashcards/index.html.)
- High quality decks: these are curated decks, and we wanted not only decks tied to first-year grammars but also comprehensive decks to help students beyond the first year, clergy keeping up their skills, etc.
- Power and freedom to create complex decks easily (e.g. filtering by frequency and location in the Bible, part of speech, chapter in a grammar, lexeme, or gloss and still providing control even beyond that)
- Beautiful rendering of UNICODE Greek, Hebrew, and Aramaic across operating systems
- Display of Hebrew and Aramaic glosses catered to the stem-based nature of the Semitic verbal system. Glosses for the stems can be separated to different parts of the screen, using darkness to indicate frequency in that stem, and stems in which the verb is quite infrequent can even be hidden.
- Use of the Leitner method of spaced repetition for efficient learning according to the way the brain works
You are correct on the cons. As for con #1, our emphasis is on providing high-quality, curated cards. We don't allow users to created their own content and share it (apart from derivative decks, which users are welcome to share) because we don't want you to get a shared deck of sub-par quality and waste your time. We may cave at some point and allow users to create their own cards, but in the meantime, we'll make sure they spend their time learning the right information the first time with all of the helpful metadata for organizing the cards. As for #2, it's a Java application, and you're right, while I use a Java look-and-feel designed for Mac (on Mac), that doesn't match a typical Mac application in every way. I agree that #3 and #4 would be nice and are on our radar; check back with us every once in awhile to look for updates!
~Drayton Benner
President, Miklal Software Solutions (MiklalSoftware.com)
PhD Student, Northwest Semitic Philology, University of Chicago
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