A useful app on your phone

The app I find most useful at the moment is a simple flashcard app called Anki. It's free on most phones, and it helps you remember things using a method called spaced repetition.

I found out about it about a year ago from a senior at university who was preparing for a medical licensing exam. She told me she'd memorised thousands of drug names with it, and I was sceptical at first, but I decided to try it for IELTS vocabulary.

Now I use it every single day, usually twice: about fifteen minutes on the bus in the morning and another ten minutes before I go to sleep. The way it works is that you make cards with a word on one side and the meaning and an example sentence on the other. The app then shows you each card just before you're likely to forget it, so words you find difficult come back more often and easy ones appear less.

It's useful to me because it turns dead time into study time. Instead of scrolling through social media on the bus, I'm reviewing collocations. It's also motivating, because the app shows statistics, and I can see that I've learnt over twelve hundred new words and phrases since I started. Most importantly, I actually remember them. In the past I'd write vocabulary lists in a notebook and never look at them again. This app has genuinely changed the way I study.