Mobile flash cards app for learning English vocabulary that utilizes the Leitner system. Born out of need. Made exclusively with exciting web technologies.
This is one of my best side projects. I designed and created this mobile web app to help me learn new vocabulary in a quick and efficient manner. While there are a few flashcard apps available, I found that most of them have either poor UI and UX or that the flashcards sorting system isn’t really effective. This app was made to address just that, to combine great UI with an efficacious algorithm.
Let’s say you came across a new word that you don’t know yet. Naturally, you would like to learn this word, so that in the future you can understand more of what someone is saying. This is where the app comes in. You can save all the new words that you come across inside the app. The app will then sort all your words and highlight the ones that you come across the most.
Apart from storing all your unfamiliar words, this app will also help you to learn them in the form of high-quality, auto-generated flashcards. All cards contain detailed and thorough definitions with helpful sentence examples that allow me to better understand how the word may be used in the real world, by real authors.
Since this is a side-project, I can only manage to devote so much time to its development. To automatically create flashcards I first wanted to use a dictionary API. I have quickly realized though, that this way, I would constantly have to deal with updating my code to fit new APIs but also, traditional dictionaries don’t have definitions for some of the slang words that are commonly used in English.
What I decided to do instead is to use the Google search engine. Adding the word “define” before any word in Google will quickly pull up its definition along with other links to more niche dictionaries specializing in slang, idioms or etymology.
To get sentence examples, I created a little PHP web scalper app that retrieves sentence examples from the web and saves them inside a PHP database. The app then retrieves this data and presents it in a nice UI, where practiced sentences can be marked green.
This app heavily relies on AJAX, PHP technologies and WordPress to store and cache the data. In the future, I plan to replace this solution with more modern technologies like MongoDB, Node and Express.js.
I always like to learn new things from different domains of tech. I enjoy the process of learning, hacking and tinkering with new and promising tools very much indeed and I think this app reflects that.
I really enjoyed making this and please keep in mind that this is very much a work-in-progress. I already have ideas and plans that will help me further improve the app. If you like what you saw, please don’t hesitate to get in touch with me, I’d love to know what you think! You can use the form below to get in touch or you contact me in other ways:
Email me: peter@everlydesigns.co.uk
Phone/Text/WhatsApp/Telegram: +44 7762 397190