Wow! Tea.ch cards + flashcardexchange!

[nate.gray]

So,
I'm new to this site, but I love it. My G1 and I go everywhere, life just seems better with it around. That being said, right now I'm learning Japanese and live in NYC (so I have a lot of travel time underground w/o service... boo). I've been wanting to learn those pesky Kanji and Katakana, and with the help of this App I can. (This isn't a sales pitch, it's just how I talk). I found this site called Flash Card Exchange where you can browse literally thousands of files of flash cards (w/o even signing up). And if you have the program Tea.ch Cards Light on your phone, there's another amazing thing you can do.

First you go to Tea.ch cards homepage and download their sample txt file to use as a template. Then you go to Flash Card Exchange and find flash cards for something that you want to learn, for example Japanese. When you click on the flash cards you get taken to info about the deck. Then you click the "Activities" tab, click "View Card List," and just copy and paste the entire list into the txt file (deleting the previous stuff). Then save it as (whatever you wanna name it).txt and put it on your sd card. Afterwards you create a new deck in Tea.ch cards light and hit the Menu button, hit Import, and import the txt file.

It takes a little work at first to figure out exactly how you want to format your txt file (comma separated or tabular or space or whatever, as well as how many sides you want for each card). After about 20 minutes of time I have three separate decks, one for my japanese vocab, one for basic kanji, and one for katakana. (I've uploaded them as resource material). Ultimately, ANYTHING on that site (Flash Card Exchange) can be made into a learning tool for you. The only shortcomings are 1- Tea.ch cards is a "light" version, so it can only handle 500 cards per deck and 2- It only allows up to three decks. BUT you can have all the txt files you want saved on your sd card (the biggest one of mine is a whopping 8kb haha), so just delete a deck and make a new one anytime you need to re-learn something. Enjoy!!

[TheBlur]

I found this writeup very helpful. Thanks for the info.

[nate.gray]

You're welcome! I'm glad you liked it. It made me love my phone even more when I discovered this!

[Fat Anarchy]

I have downloaded this app, as I have been looking for something like this for a while. I remember trying to do it on my Ipod to no avail, lol.

I have created my own .txt based on the flashcard exchange website, but I am not having much success. It keeps crashing it. I don't think its a problem with the app itself, as it works fine on the test .txt on the website. I think I have just formatted my word file wrong. I need to have a play around to get it to work how I want, and to use the seperators properly.

I think when I have a proper play around with this it should be OK. If I manage to get this to work how I want it, it will be a gift from the gods. Thanks for the post.

[nate.gray]

No problem! What you wanna check for is any spaces or "tabs" because if you said when importing that you wanna separate it by spaces, and there is a rogue space somewhere, it will through off all of the entries after it. basically just make sure that they are in two neat rows going straight down, and that they are all the same distance apart and starting at the same spot. Trust me, I have used it every singe day since I discovered how to use it. You're gonna love it!

[Los-O]

does this support korean also?

[nate.gray]

Yep!

I'm currently learning Japanese. All you have to do is find the cardset for Korean on the Flash Card Exchange site.

[oxonom]

As the the developer of Tea.ch Cards, I'm glad you like it.

Many users don't know the 'long press' feature. When touching for 2 seconds you'll get a context menu. By 'long press' on a deck, you get the option to save it on the sd card. The program stores the status of the learning process, which can be restored as well.

@FatAnarchy: Can you send me a text file on that the program keeps crashing, to phyrum.tea@sign.ch? If you are using Notepad on Windows XP, make sure that Encoding is set to Unicode and use UTF-16 on Android. If you use UTF-8 on Windows XP, then UTF-8 on Android.

@Los-O: If you can see korean characters on your Android phone, then it'll work with korean as well. What is not supported by Android are right to left texts like arabic and other semitic languages.

[Fat Anarchy]

Thanks for the offer, but I have managed to format it properly after a little bit of messing about with it.

I am finding it to be a very useful application. Many thanks for developing it.

[nate.gray]

Hey there,
I'm so glad that you made this program. Honestly it's one of my favorites right now. I think that a clean UI, and simple, but necessary programs are the best ones. I can't imagine being in the subway and not working on learning more kanji because of this. Between your program and the unlimited supply of materials from Flash Card Exchange there's nothing I can't learn.