Writing challenge. Day 3. Hello! Today I am going to tell you about the modern way of studying vocabulary using the spaced repetition technique. As I told earlier flashcards are effective, but have some inconveniences in using. You need to prepare them manually, sort them manually, work with them manually and decks with the cards could occupy a lot of space. All these disadvantages could be removed by using an electronic version of this technique. Actually, there are a lot of different resources that can propose you such functionality. You could find different websites on the internet, apps in Play or App Store, special software for PC or Mac. But I would like to recommend the most effective app that I have ever met in that area. It's Anki. https://apps.ankiweb.net/ It's a free and open-source spaced repetition flashcard program. Anki has versions for almost every platform and you could synchronize your decks between your gadgets whenever you want. If one wishes to improve one's vocabulary, one could do it with Anki software. Anki could be readily used on a smartphone, a tablet or on any device that has web-browser. Anki has a big community. It's possible to download decks that were made by other people. For example, it could be a deck with the most frequent words or a deck with the words for a special theme. Anki could be used not only for vocabulary learning. You could use it for learning everything. Anything that has question and answer could be placed on a card and learn with Anki. Anki is a very flexible software. It has so big functionality so it's easy to get started with but difficult to master. I have been using Anki for 3 years and strongly recommend you try it. If you have any questions regarding it, I would be pleased to answer.

Writing challenge. Day 2. Today I am going to continue my theme about the spaced repetition technique. I decided to make my entries not bigger than 350 words because it shouldn't take too much time to correct. Well, the notion of spaced repetition was firstly proposed by Prof. C. A. Mace in 1932 in the book "Psychology of Study". He wrote that learned material should be revisioned in gradually increasing intervals. Because this approach gives a possibility to remember learning material more deeply. Later this idea went to the manual style of learning with physical flashcards that was proposed by Sebastian Leitner. Generally, the idea of flashcards in vocabulary learning context works as follows: - Whenever a student comes across a new word he creates a card. One side of this card contains the new word and the back side contains the translation. - A student sorts cards by three groups. The first group includes cards with new words. The second group is a transitional place. The third group is for cards that student knows very well. - A student studies cards from the first group - each day, cards from the second group - every three days and cards from the third group - every 5 days. - Each time when a student gives the right answer looking at a question on the card, the card goes from the current group to the group with a bigger number. - If a student doesn't remember the answer or makes the wrong one, the card goes to the previous group. Even this simple method might significantly improve your vocabulary studying process. But it's good for the old times and later I will tell you how to change manual flashcards to the contemporary way of studying with a similar technique.