Studying ancient languages can be difficult. The letters are different, the word order doesn’t match English, and no one speaks it anymore to be able to help you study it. Usually when studying an ancient language, students must master not only new verb forms and syntax, but also hundreds of new vocabulary words.
Enter Anki.
Anki software allows users to create digital flashcards they can carry around with them on their phone and/or laptop. Anki’s flexible software allows users to go beyond traditional flashcards and add in images, text, even audio files.
Anki relies on spaced repetition to work properly. This is especially useful if you have a large quantity of new vocabulary to learn. Instead of seeing all words every single day, you only see the newest words, words you have not seen in a long time, and words you have a hard time learning. I usually could study my Middle Egyptian deck in 10 minutes or less a day despite having 700 words in the deck.
Taking advantage of this, my colleage and I endeavored to create flashcards to help us learn Middle Egyptian.
We created images of the words in their original hieroglyphs, then added a field for translation and transliteration (how we render the hieroglyphs into rough English sounds).
We also adjusted the coding so the the transliteration would only appear on the “back” of the card. When we were quizzed on vocabulary, we were either given just the English or just the Egyptian and had to provide the reverse and the transliteration. By only seeing the transliteration with the answer, this helped us learn the words faster.
Having created the Middle Egyptian deck, I expanded my Anki library to include decks for every language I studied. Each deck could be customized to work precisely as I needed it to.
Demotic including an image of the word, transliteration, and English translation.
Coptic using a Coptic font downloaded to my computer and English translation.
Finally, Anki is shareable! Anyone with the program or a web account can download decks created by other users and study them at their own pace. These decks can sync across devices, meaning you can study from your computer on Tuesday and from your phone on Wednesday without losing your spaced repetition scheduling information.
By using Anki, my colleage and I were able to learn Middle Egyptian and other languages much easier than by using traditional paper note cards. The flexibility of Anki allowed us to personalize our study sessions despite co-creating the deck. I expanded my library to include other languages and will never look back!