Surely users everywhere are asking one question: can I use my iPhone to review Greek vocabulary? Absolutely. No problem.

Since the iPhone employs Unicode fonts, displaying Greek text properly and consistently is not a problem. Students of classical or biblical Greek can use their iPhones to learn words, review for quizzes, and keep their knowledge fresh. Unfortunately, the iPhone font sets are limited and will not display some characters normally included in the set, such as Hebrew and Arabic, or other essential semitic fonts (like Syriac). Daring Fireball discusses basic iPhone font issues and This Lamp reports on iPhone tests done with biblical languages, exploring the Hebrew problem. Hopefully font shortcomings will be rectified in future so users not only can review their Syriac grammar but access a full range of foreign language websites as well.

Okay. Back to Greek vocab. How does it work? An app called iFlashCards already exists. It’s a very basic flash card program that cycles through a designated list of terms, displaying each word or prompt separately and giving the student a chance to recall a definition or any other information associated with the prompt. After pushing the “Answer” button, an answer is displayed. Students can also move backward or forward through the list. Unfortunately, however, the program will not randomize the list, and it’s also a shame that it will not quiz users in the other direction—prompting them with the “answer” and asking for the “question.” Those two features would greatly enhance the educational value of any flash card program.

Flash cards sets for such things as GRE vocab are already available and creating other sets on a computer is a simple matter. iFlashCards runs using two simple text files — one with a list of questions (called “questions.txt”) and one with the list of answers (”answers.txt”) stored in a named folder (“Greek Vocab”) in a particular place on your iPhone (more on that in a minute). The files must be simple “txt” files, a format which TextEdit on the Mac no longer saves. Mac users will therefore need to get some other basic text editor. I used BBedit or their free TextWrangler 2. In order to preserve the proper formatting, I chose the following options during the save procedure: Unix line breaks, Unicode (UTF 16) encoding. Instructions for basic flash card creation can be found here.

Did I say using your iPhone to review Greek was no problem? That may have been an overstatement, since you have to crack into your iPhone’s software to get iFlashCards running and also to transfer the flash card files to it. This isn’t simple, though online help is available. First, install AppTapp Installer on your iPhone by downloading it to your computer and synching it to your iPhone according to the precise instructions given. Many intrepid users will already have done this. Then use the Installer to install the Community Sources package directly to your iPhone. Now iFlashCards appears under Productivity when you run Installer. Select it and download the program to your iPhone, after which iFlashCards will appear on your home screen.

In order to transfer flash card sets, refer to the tutorial. You’ll need to set your iPhone up for SSH to enable file transfer. Use AppTapp Installer to install the BSD Subsystem package, followed by the OpenSSH package. Then use a program on your computer for WiFi file transfer — FuGu works well and is free. The transfer requires that the iPhone be on WiFi. Folders with flash card sets need to be stored in the /var/root/Library/iFlashCards directory on your iPhone, since that’s where iFlashCards looks for them.

This just gives you a sense of how it works. Every iPhone user is hoping that things like basic file transfer and the installation of third-party software becomes much simpler very soon. Meanwhile, there are undoubtedly different ways of accomplishing some of the steps I’ve mentioned above, and the online instructions and tutorials should be referred to at every stage.

But after you’ve done all of this, you’re ready to review Greek! If someone would only take an app like the MusicQuiz multimedia package game and adapt it to other areas of knowledge, we’d have even more possibilities for using the iPhone to review vocab and basic concepts. MusicQuiz already quizzes in a more interesting and educationally robust way than the present version of iFlashCards allows. Still, iFlashCards is a useful alternative… at least for the time being.