Hey HN - a little background, which might be interesting to some. I went through YC twice, the second time with a company called EveryArt. After working on that for two years as a solo founder, I decided to close it down. I moved from San Francisco to Istanbul and started a niche business (actually, just renamed EveryArt, Inc. in fairness to investors) that has done well enough to support me. I started teaching myself objective C in January to eventually build CleverDeck, which was motivated out of dissatisfaction with the available spaced repetition apps available (Anki, Memrise, etc.) I'll be hanging around if you have any questions. Thanks!
Nice UI. I would love if you add a "Advanced English" deck. I have a 11 years old vocabluary (according to some online test I forgot the name).<p>There is a place for people learning english as a second language where you know enough to be able to communicate, but you don't have a good enough vocabulary to express more sophisticated ideas, or express simple ideas more elegantly. I am at this place and I am sure there are lots of others here.
Looks and works really, really nicely. I am currently in the midst of cramming Spanish (trip to Barcelona in two weeks, trip to Cuba in four months, woo hoo!) and I've been using these two trips as a motivation to finally learn the Spanish I've always wanted to know.<p>I've been using Duolingo a lot, as well as Memrise. Memrise has been quite good so far, but it is certainly not very polished, whereas this seems extremely well-done.<p>Congratulations on the launch, this looks like a superb product and if it works for me I'd be happy to pay for it. That's a clever idea for in-app purchases too, by the way.
Everyone seems to be focused on languages but is there something like this for music? Especially instrument specific, for example a card for finger placement?<p>Would something like that require me custom adding every card? and somehow figuring out how to get pictures/symbols on the cards instead of just text? FWIW I don't know how hard that is with existing apps, maybe it's gotten easier.<p>Sorry if it is a derail.
One thing that's unclear in the app description: does the free app come with 3000 words? And then is the $15 purchase is for an additional 3000? That would be amazing!<p>Are all the words nouns? Or are there verbs/adjectives/adverbs, too?<p>Is there a way to create a set of flashcards via a file upload? That'd be a wonderful feature!
I almost hate to ask this question here because this seems like a really nice product, but does anyone know of any similar apps? I ask because I'm learning Polish, a language not yet available on CleverDeck.
Is this a language learning app or a spaced repetition studying app? I'd be interested in something with a smoother UI thank Anki, but that seems to be the established app for med school
Congrats! Amazing job. I'm learning Spanish and I'm a big fan of flash cards. I use FlashCards++ (for words that I add myself), but it's good to have another app that can bring me new vocabulary (I went over all Duolingo and done with it), seems like you have advanced vocabulary which is great. I've used Memrise in the past, but the UI, the offline caching, and the difficulty to know which deck was high quality turned me off. Great job and add Tagalog(Filipino) if you can one day!
Great work Justin. As an intermediate/advanced Turkish speaker, I find a lot of value in being able to learn new vocabulary easily and in a manageable way. Thanks for building this.
Going through the French deck, I've noticed some errors, especially with gender and homonyms - is there a built-in, effective way to report these kind of problems to the devs?
Does anyone have an idea why I get a McAffee Web Gateway error with:<p>Alert: This website has a Security Reputation Rating of High Risk
URL: <a href="http://cleverdeck.com/" rel="nofollow">http://cleverdeck.com/</a>
Category:
Site Reputation: Medium Risk
Code: Reputation Coaching<p>How is "Reputation coaching" a bad thing? I don't even know what it is but unfortunately I also don't want to risk getting a red flag in the system because I'm trying to find out.<p>Anyone have any ideas?
Looking great, just a small pet peeve, in the coming soon section, above portuguese you have the brazil flag, feels kinda weird being portuguese and seeing that :)
Thanks so much for building this! Just purchased the full 3k Spanish deck. You've saved me a ton of time vs. my plan of writing a script to build my own Anki decks.<p>One question: is there a recommendation on whether to go with English-first or target-language-first when studying? I prefer to go with Spanish-first, but I don't know if there's any data on which is more effective. Thanks again!
I'm desperate to find this kind of app for Chinese. Stuff like Duolingo and the like are all great, but no Chinese :(<p>But good job, this app looks great!
Really great apps just downloaded them all. I've picked up turkish from my wife but it's still great to get more practice. Only suggestion is the right-ward swipe on cards to dismiss them as well-known should trigger earlier - I find myself having to swipe further than I feel I need to in order to dismiss the card. Otherwise great work & thanks for sharing
Really nice work! I don't know about the market but given I'm about to go to Paris it's here just in time for me to bone up on my french! I like the 'learn a little everyday' approach, and I found even putting those cards back not only easy from a UX perspective but effective in that I had already forgotten 'drapeau'!
I think you should consider adding a newsletter sign-up form to the website. I would love to use this for Japanese, but there is no way to 'subscribe' to your apps. (You've posted a link to your blog below, so I think I'll just add it to my RSS reader, but I wouldn't have found it without the HN comments.)
Awesome, I signed up to be notified of new languages. But the field border just turned green. Does that mean it went through?<p>Looking at the network it seems the return value was success, but it says "We'll just need to confirm your email address".<p>Shouldn't there be some text or something besides a green border?<p>Either way this looks awesome...
As someone trying to use SR to learn new things, I'm always tempted to build my own software. Congrats for doing it!<p>The one gripe I have--about this and every other SRS--is that it seems geared ONLY for language learning. While SRS works very well for that, I suspect it works well for much more than that.
I can't install it right now as I am upgrading to iOS 8 but why is the app free and the 3000+ cards mentioned in the description cost $15?<p>Is it because the App store doesn't support any form of trial? It may be unfair, but I always feel like I am being tricked when a purchase is set up this way?
How does this compare to Anki?<p>Duolingo is nice, but it's not as good for cramming as for low-intensity, long-term learning. Anki is awesome for just "I'm going to memorize this speech like a poem"
This looks really cool, definitely going to download it and give it a shot. (btw I didn't know what spaced repetition was and your wikipedia link is missing the colon on your about page)
> "We can email you when we launch new languages."<p>How? Presumably I'm being slow because others have managed it, but I can't figure out how to sign up to be notified...
Looks marvelous, very handsome UX, wonderful idea to have native speakers to help with pronunciation.<p>I've been using Duolingo to learn Italian, and I'd love to see an Italian deck!
Why didn't you create a single app with all card sets as in app purchases? I use Mental Case which allows you to share sets and download sets from other people.
German and Mandarin are my two requests (even just 300 or so Mandarin cards would be great! I'll help!). Just started on French while I wait, looks great! :)
I have been using Anki for a while now and i love it. I wish there are more spaced repetition apps out there that are not limited to learning a language.
I was so excited... then saw the ios only :/<p>EDIT: then I even realized there are only specific languages supported? we can't add our own? this is useless..