Karteto: Vocabulary Flashcards

This is a pretty good app. I’ve been able to gather so many vocab flashcards in such a short amount of time. It’s very quick and easy to create your own decks, and I love how swiftly you’re able to add words that are relevant to your interests and your language learning motivations. The elephant in the room: AI. All of the cards are AI-generated, which is fundamentally fine. It’s a very quick, simple, and malleable way to do things—I mean, how else could Karteto efficiently offer flashcards for dozens of languages? The problem is that many of the AI-generated example sentences are terrible, wrong, or straight-up gibberish. Hoping this gets improved, as it’s a big issue. I’d really like to see some more options regarding spaced repetition. The app’s SRS is totally opaque; there are no visible settings or customization. Along with that, it’s a bummer you can’t add images to flashcards you’ve manually created. The monthly subscription is price is also pretty expensive considering the affordability of the annual sub… Anyway, if you come with realistic expectations, bearing in mind that AI is imperfect, I think you’ll be very happy with your experience. This is one of the best language-learning apps I’ve found to date and I think it’s got loads of potential. It’s a billion times more efficient than making your own Anki cards.

This app has great potential! I used it for a week during the free trial and definitely found the teaching method helpful as I did in fact learn many new words. However, serious glitches prevented me from continuing past the free trial. Whenever I tried to add new words and scrolled down to the bottom end of the list, the app started glitching like crazy and I was unable to add new words. I do not think this was a wifi issue as I tested my speeds and also tried on data. This was incredibly frustrating. Please fix this and I would be happy to come back to the app!

When learning a new word for the first time, the app (helpfully) tries to have an example sentence where you would use the word. Herein lies the problem: the word never actually gets used! It seems as if the phrase is typed in with one language and using an online translator translated to the language that you’re working with. Although the word you’re learning may also mean “farewell”, the translator uses a different word completely. Additionally, when clicking on a word in the sentence that you don’t know to (potentially) add to your learning list, it sometimes has the wrong definition. “Ich hasse Spinnen” should translate to “I hate spiders”, but when you tap on “Spinnen”, the app translates it to “to spin”, so adding the vocab word ends up not working at all. Difficult to justify paying for so far, although the app is very promising!