🃏 Kaards: A Flashcard Tool for Language Learners

A first impression review of Kaards

❔ Why Kaards?

I resisted calling this post anything that would allude to Kaards being a new Anki as it would be reductive to only compare Kaards to Anki. New tools, apps, and resources should be able to stand on their own without needing to take over.

Before I go into explaining what Kaards is and my first impressions of Kaards, I’d like to share why exactly I’m writing about Kaards. As a disclaimer, the Kaards team does not know I am writing this first impression post but I have shared the bugs and errors I encountered during my experience using Kaards.¹

Where it All Started

I first learned about Kaards almost a year ago when it was mentioned in one of Lindie Bote’s language learning videos. All I knew at the time was that Kaards was available in German but would be available in other languages in the future. Since I wasn’t learning German, I assumed there would be no use in trying out Kaards.

While writing about how I learn vocabulary in my target languages and providing short reviews of spaced repetition tools, I remembered Kaards. I wanted to include Kaards in my post as I knew it was a flashcard tool with an SRS system. However, it didn’t feel right to include it without having used it myself.

I decided to try out Kaards for a few days (luckily there was a 7-day free trial) so I could include it in my list. I was willing to learn a little bit of German if it meant that was the only way I could test Kaards. It turns out that Kaards can be used like any other flashcard tool to create vocab cards for multiple languages, not just German.

Knowing what I know now about Kaards, this post is going to contain information I would’ve liked to know before using Kaards. It’s my hope that with more information, other language learners can decide whether Kaards is the right tool for them.

🃏 What is Kaards?

If you’re like me, then you need an enormous amount of information before committing to anything. Even after reading the Kaards website, and an article on Medium, it wasn’t clear to me if Kaards was something I could use to learn my target languages. This is one aspect of Kaards I think could be done better to accurately show what exactly Kaards is and does.

In the Medium article written in January 2022, the Kaards team describes Kaards as

“an app consisting of professionally made flashcard decks with community generated context sentences, clear statistics, and goal setting to guide you to your language goals”²

When I hear goal setting, I think of actually setting goals such as a number of cards to learn by a certain date.

“Kaards lets you set personalized language goals and estimates how long it will likely take to reach them”

The only goal options I saw were for the length of a session timer and how many cards to flip per session. Viewing progress shows you additional stats but none of this shows estimations on how long you’ll reach your goal.

Deconstructing the language learning process

In their Manifesto, they further go on to explain their goal of deconstructing the language learning process into different flashcard decks.

Since German is the only language that currently supports their process, the following decks are available: alphabet, genders, numbers, plurals and vocabulary. Although some of the decks are labelled as A1, you can edit each deck to adjust the level, change the audio accent and change the length of each session.

I tested the German vocabulary deck to see what future decks in my TLs would look like when they are available in Kaards. The back of a card is labelled by the part of speech, with the English translation in the top right. In the middle is the German vocab word and an example sentence below. There is additional information at the bottom of the screen which tells you how many new cards you’ve seen, how much time is left in your session, cards flipped and the accuracy of those cards.

That was enough for me to understand what the decks created by Kaards looked like. I switched to my other TLs, to see if there were also decks provided. Sadly there were no available decks but I was able to create my own deck or import an Anki deck.

I tried importing an Icelandic deck to Kaards. It imported properly but when I went to learn the cards in that deck, it said “Hmm… it seems like this deck has no cards”. I also had issues importing other decks. The Anki import feature is new so I’m sure it’ll continue to be worked on.

🗂️ Making Custom Decks With Kaards

I was pleasantly surprised to find that I could make decks in 4 out of my 5 target languages (Cantonese is not currently on Kaards). Since Icelandic is my newest language, I was eager to now have a tool to learn my own vocab with.

Creating a deck is extremely simple. On the deck creation page, you are presented with sections to add cards. You can either type in English and Kaards will automatically translate the word or sentence into your TL or type in your TL and get a translation in English.

To build my deck, I used phrases and vocab lists from my Beginner’s Icelandic textbook. I was amazed by how easy it was to type a sentence and immediately get the same translation which was provided in the textbook. Audio was also provided for each word/sentence I added.

There were instances where words were pronounced as they were written rather than how they would be said in conversation. This isn’t too much of an issue for me because I don’t use flashcard tools as my only method of learning. I always try to listen to native material first and treat SRS as a way to give me more exposure to words I already have context for.

Learning Sessions

Unlike the German decks made by Kaards, the custom decks are basic. There are two learning style settings, active & passive. By default, all decks are set to active. The active learning style setting shows you your target word on the back of the card and English on the front of the card. The passive learning style setting shows you the target word first.

After you flip a card, example sentences are hidden but can be shown by clicking the top right button. This feature has changed since drafting this post. Example sentences now take up the whole screen instead of half the screen. I did like the way it looked taking up half the screen, though.

When a review session is completed, you are given information about the cards you studied and statistics about your session.

Wordlists for each deck show the strength of each card.

Progress Statistics

As you can tell from my weekly study logs & monthly recaps, I like stats. I rely on the tools I use to give me information about my learning so I can better understand my language progress.

Kaards also wants to use stats to visually represent your language progress. The information you get regarding your progress differs depending on if you are viewing all decks in your target language or one specific deck.

When looking at your progress for all decks in a specific language, there is information about your stats for the day, all time stats, a leaderboard and a heatmap of your active days. I feel that the all-time and consistency information is incorrect. My all-time start date is incorrect since I started using Kaards on the 8th of May but it doesn’t matter too much.

Based on the heatmap, I’ve studied for 8 days. This is incorrect because I also studied on the 9th yet the heatmap says I reviewed 0 cards. Even if the 8 days were correct, the total days studied should say 8, not 7.

If the consistency stat is supposed to reflect how many days in a row I’ve studied, it should say 1 since I broke my 2-day streak after not studying yesterday.

The deck-specific progress stats provide more information like your accuracy, vocabulary size and learning velocity. One of the most useful stat to me is vocabulary size. It makes sense to me to include vocabulary size on the “All Decks” page. On that page, it should include the cards/words you know from all decks in that language. On the deck page, the stat only needs to select your vocabulary size from that specific deck.

💜 What I Like About Kaards

Although I pointed out bugs I encountered, I do like Kaards. Thanks to Kaards, I now have a tool to learn my own vocab in Icelandic and French. This is something I didn’t have before and I’m already looking forward to increasing my vocabulary in these languages with the help of Kaards.

A summary of what I like about Kaards:

1. Translation + audio for cards: Creating cards is easy as each card gets automatically translated with audio

2. Customizable sessions: I can limit a study session by time, by the number of cards I want to review or review freely

3. Custom decks + retention: I’m able to remember vocab through repetition and by only adding words that are relevant to me in my decks

📨 Feedback for Kaards

Kaards is still in beta so the bugs and issues I ran into weren’t unexpected. I have already shared most of these bugs with the Kaards team, who have been very receptive and quick at solving them. Some additional bugs that have been fixed since I started writing this post will be crossed out if they are no longer relevant.

🐛 Bugs

1. Decks don’t disappear after being deleted even though there is a pop-up message that says “Deck removed! Deck was successfully removed”.

2. Fixed: The list of words that need to be reviewed after a session can’t be sorted by strength (the button doesn't do anything and words get repeated multiple times in a list)

3. Importing Anki decks doesn’t always work - decks are empty/don’t import at all. A pop-up message says “Sorry! There is something wrong with this deck. Please try another”

4. Fixed: When viewing example sentences during a review session, the page crashes when the incorrect button is clicked

   1. Example sentences now take up the whole screen instead of sliding out from the right. This means you have to hide the example sentences before flipping a card or marking a card as correct or incorrect. As a result, this bug doesn’t occur any longer

5. The search function on the wordlist page doesn’t work/no results are shown

6. Progress stats don’t seem to be accurate

   1. Heatmap missed a day I studied as not studied

📝 Features I’d Like To See

** = added after this post was written

1. ** Audio support for Mandarin

2. ** Cantonese language availability

3. Goal setting with estimations of when you’ll reach those goals

4. Ability to customize user profile to hide/show specific decks

5. An overall leaderboard across all languages (currently in works)

6. Ability to see a stat about your total vocab size on the “all decks page”

7. Additional progress stats for decks instead of progress only showing cards that have been seen

   1. As of now, if you have seen every card in a deck once, the progress says you have 100% completed that deck even though the strength of each card may be low

   2. Separate stats to show overall deck progress + card known + new card percentage would be useful

8. Ability to see a list of words in any deck before learning that deck, even if it’s just a preview

9. Ability to add tags for each card/additional info (for example adding the gender of a word)

📝 Summary

Learning multiple languages has allowed me to try out new tools. If Mandarin were my only target language, I know I would’ve found Kaards to be ineffective, at least compared to other tools. For my other TLs like Icelandic, and French I’m able to see how Kaards can be a useful tool in my language learning journey.

Kaards seems to be heading in the right direction. I hope that my post has highlighted what Kaards does and how language learners can use it. I believe that with more user feedback, Kaards can become what every language learner needs it to be for them.

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If you’d like to give Kaards a try, you can provide anonymous feedback to the team through this Google form. I suppose I no longer have to do that since I’ve written this post!

Thanks for reading!

1. The Kaards team did provide me with a lifetime subscription after my 1-week trial ended as a thank you for the feedback I provided during my initial testing of the tool

2. https://medium.com/kaards/language-learning-deconstructed-introducing-kaards-f59a6e6c226