Much has changed since I first wrote about using the iPhone as a tool for reviewing Greek flash cards (Fall 2007).  The App Store makes available a number of flash card programs and specialized card sets, downloadable straight to the iPhone. I have been using iFlipr recently.  It has a simple, online interface that lets you create flash card decks, edit cards, and—if you like—share them with the world. iFlipr boasts over 1,000,000 user-created cards already available. Although the decks are stored online at iFlipr.com, the phone app keeps them synced with your device so that you can easily practice anywhere offline. The program is fairly simple but does have some smart features to aid learning. Also, cards can have graphic (jpg, gif, pdf, png) or audio content (mp3, wav), instead of just text content.

Back to Greek. Since the iPhone has no trouble displaying Greek text properly and consistently, creating Greek flash cards is a snap. Simply log into the iFlipr site and set up a free user account, create a deck, and begin typing the card information into the editor.  I have been creating decks of cards classified according to the words’ frequency of occurrence in the Greek New Testament, to help students of Koine Greek drill vocabulary anywhere they happen to be. They can practice using the iPhone, or they may do so on their computers through the online interface.  The cards display very nicely on the iPhone.  Students are able to control card order and to drill both Greek-to-English and English-to-Greek by changing the flip order. As they practice, they can track mastery levels by indicating whether their answers are correct.

What about Hebrew? Handling complex scripts is more of a problem for iFlipr’s editor and also for iPhone. It is easy enough to type in Hebrew while using iFlipr’s online editor—so long as you use Unicode fonts and your operating system and browser support the fonts, the keyboards, and right-to-left typing.  But the fonts do not always display properly on the iPhone, especially when vowel pointing and other diacritical marks are needed, and even when they do, typeface choices are limited and unappealing. Although this may be due to problems with iFlipr and its editor’s limited set of fonts, the iPhone is not above suspicion. Even with 3G’s expanded language capabilities, it continues to have problems displaying complex scripts, as Multilingual Mac reports.

Given these limitations, creating flash cards involving complex, context-sensitive scripts like Syriac or Arabic would seem hopeless. However, I have created a number of attractive Syriac vocabulary decks that exploit iFlipr’s graphics capabilities.  The front side of each card is actually a JPEG image of the Syriac word. The process is as follows: I created a list of Syriac words on my laptop using my favorite semitic-language word processor for the Mac (Mellel),  typing each word on its own, 3×5-inch page. Then I converted the document to PDF format. After converting each page of the PDF into a JPEG file, I uploaded the graphic to iFlipr as the front side of a new card. Then I simply typed the word’s definition into the back-side editor using the iFlipr interface. By sharing the cards online, my students are able to access them freely. Any updates or corrections to the decks quickly sync to their devices. The JPEG conversion is the most cumbersome part of the process, so I streamlined it by using Apple’s Automator utility to create a quick and easy workflow, which saves a lot of time.

Although the process is more involved than for Greek vocabulary, it gives me more control over the cards’ appearance. Since I use the attractive Meltho fonts for my Syriac word-processing, students get a high-quality reading experience when they practice with my Syriac decks. Obviously, the same process could be employed to create nice Hebrew flash cards as well.

Hopefully, iFlipr will soon allow users to combine different types of information on a single card—text and audio, for instance. Such a feature would have obvious benefits for learning languages. Yet it is certain that these and other features will continue to appear as new education apps are developed and existing ones improved.