Lately I’ve been using ankidroid to study Finnish – or at least to expand my vocabulary a bit. I think it’s great but it won’t work by itself and requires quite a bit of tenacity.
The good Finnish deck:https://ankiweb.net/shared/info/1918695216 it’s called “Finnish järjestyksessä”.
It’s made by Rendall and it’s quite good, it took a list of the most common Finnish words (assembled by my company ;)
The deck won’t work by itself though, I get a lot of help by:
- Get the word in a sentence helps tremendously for learning it. Just learning the words helps a lot, especially if you don’t care so much about using the exact right form. Learning how to use them is also important, and that’s where talking or reading things help.
- Asking someone for assistance or clarifications about words is important. For example you might have words that are translated to the same word in English but you’d use them differently in Finnish.
Some notes about the contents:
- Some translations are not awesome or the first word that shows up is the archaic meaning. So for those you’d want to click the edit card and change the meaning to something modern.
- Some erisnimi words are just fairly useless unless you want to learn a city /person name, like NATO, Salo, Joensuu, Jorma or Jukka. They might have a different meaning besides the city name but they’re rarely/never used for that meaning.
Making changes to the template:
On each card there is this “info” and sometimes hints. I found myself wanting to change the URL to wiktionary on the cards because google chrome didn’t redirect wiktionary.org to en.wiktionary org but to www.m.wiktionary.org which doesn’t exist. It’s quite easy to change this, because that part is done with a template and is not added in each card. To change:
- synch your decks
- install anki on your compute
- login with your account and synch it
- browse the deck and on the right-hand side you’ll see your decks and the ones you have marked and so on, there’s also a few called “adjektiivi”, “prononimit” and so on. These are the templates.
- Click on a template and then on the “Cards…” button.
- This will show “Card 1” and “Card 2”. In the back template you can then change the URL to whatever you want!
