date: 2025-02-02

LLM Generated Flashcards

TLDR: I made a little app to help generate flashcards or Anki decks with context sentences & translations. You can check it out here: https://flashcards.rjp.io. Or adjust it to your needs: https://github.com/rjpower/flashcards

Language Learning

Since I psuedo-retired, I've had more time on my hands, and while random LLM projects and amateur attempts at wood-working can fill a large portion of it, I've also decided to take up learning Japanese (again). I can't honestly say why I tried to pick up the language in the first place, but at this point I'm learning it almost entirely out of spite (for myself?). I don't have any good reason to spend my time on this, though a more charitable version of myself might say it's "for the joy of learning". A good part of it is a refusal to admit I'm too dumb to fail to learn it...

Flashcards and Memorization

With that out of the way, one of the infuriating parts of language is the sheer number of silly words you have to insert into your brain. As an engineer you're constantly trying to compress knowledge: effectively you get really good at a few basic techniques and then leverage them exhaustively. But languages are the antithesis of this: you need to consume and absorb a huge amount of let's call it "shallow" information, and have it available, literally, at the tip of your tongue. The individual "rules" (grammar, words) are simple, but there are so damn many of them.

There are great apps (e.g. Anki) to help with this exact situation, but I personally find it difficult to use these for the initial learning period: I really need to visit a concept quite a few times in short order in order for it to stick, and I found the "learning phase" of the apps wasn't conducive to this.

So I decided to fallback to the old standby -- paper flashcards. But of course we can make our lives a bit easier today with LLMs. I've found the LLM translations and context sentences really helpful as well to disambiguate terms: you don't realize how many meanings "apply" has in English until you try to figure out the equivalent in another language...

The mini-size flashcard works really well for me. I can carry them around in my pocket and review them in any down time or when I'm just strolling around:

I've found the combination of using the flashcards for a few weeks to get words into my brain, and then switching to Anki to keep up the practice works well for me: managing a fancy review schedule with flashcards is tedious, but if you're recycling them after a few weeks, you can get a way with simply grouping them together and reviewing every few days as needed.

I made the app for myself, but did a little work to put a web interface on it. You can check it out here: https://flashcards.rjp.io. Or adjust it to your needs: https://github.com/rjpower/flashcards.