Brainscape - Smart Flashcards

Update after 9 months: The text to speech feature was promised for 2025, but it is still not here. I am starting to look for an alternative app. Very disappointing. Update after 6 months: I am still waiting for the text to speech functionality. Not sure why it’s taking so long, there are so many other apps that have this built-in. I am taking away one star and will switch to another app if this is not added soon. ORIGINAL REVIEW: I have tried many flashcard apps over the years and this one truly stands out for the ease with which one can create and review cards. What I really like is the seamless synchronization between the browser version and the app version. I use the browser version to create the cards by copying and pasting material from various sources. Then I switch to the app version for the actual learning. I am using the free version and I am not missing much in terms of functionality. The one feature for which I will be very happy to pay a lifetime subscription for is “text to speech.” This will be especially helpful when learning foreign languages as you can have one side of the card being read out in English and the other one in the foreign language, for example German. I hope to see this feature soon.

I have tried a ton of methods for learning foreign languages over the years — audio only, grammar intensive, books, audiobooks, videos, computer apps, etc. They all have their little gimmick — no studying, guided situations, games, etc. And at the end of the day, the simple flashcard method (with audio) works the best at having something to say in the moment you need it and on the tip of your tongue. Brainscape takes it further by offering curated professional flash cards courses for Spanish and French, plus smaller subsets of offerings (like verbs only or nouns only) for other languages like Mandarin or Italian. I wish they had entire courses in all the popular languages, because their method works best, it really does. Their method of progressive training, interval recall, and 5-level self scoring works quite well at getting you to recall words and phrases you need to learn while moving past the stuff you already know. Plus I can create my own sets of flash cards and hook audio or picture content to them and then share them with others. All in all, there is no better method for learning a foreign language.

It hasn’t changed much over the years. It’s too bad, Apple forced a bunch of apps to consolidate if they had multiple apps for one concept. In this case, it’s language learning. Many companies that had Spanish, French, German, etc, language apps sold separately, had to consolidate all languages into one app. During this switch to the new format many apps offered a way to restore purchases. I will admit, many of my language app purchases and the app upgrades were purchased at discounts or during a free unconditional purchase, but I have lost some of the old in app purchases that I had previously. Some of my previous unlocks were for a full set (complete course) or all decks of study cards, and now I seem to only have the first or first few decks. It’s not really a big deal as I have been using other language learning apps in place of Brainscape. I will say,, the spoken content is clear compared to other apps, but it really is simply a digital study card application. I’m not really sure what I’d get for the $200 per year PRO upgrade, but $200 per year gets you a lot of upgrades with a bunch of your language apps compared to just this one, and other apps have tests/quizzes and study material that utilizes voice recognition to analyze your speech when determining if you answered correctly. I consider speaking the language more important than memorizing flash cards