Since the beginning of the year, I have been trying various flashcard applications to learn French, Mandarin, and Spanish vocabulary. These included Anki, Quizlet, and Tinycards by Duolingo. Anki is probably the oldest of the three applications with Tinycards being the newest, and all of them were recommended to me by friends actually using them.

Being a huge Duolingo fan, I fully expected to like Tinycards the most. But after using all three systems extensively, there was one app that completely won me over, and it was not Tinycards.

Below is a quick summary of the three apps, their advantages and disadvantages, and the “winner.”

The Best: Quizlet

Quizlet was the winner by a longshot. It has virtually all the functionality of Anki and Tinycards plus a lot more, including games and testing modes. It is the most modern and allows importation of word lists. It works offline (at least on mobile platforms) and can read Mandarin out loud. Quizlet is also the most fun to use.

Tinycards had too many “fatal flaws,” including painfully slow flashcard creation, no offline support for Windows or Android (so you cannot use it on most flights, which is a perfect time for reviewing flashcards), or Mandarin support.

Anki was great in its day but adding voice pronunciations and images is very tedious. It looks very dated.

How to Migrate Tinycards to Quizlet

While there is no native export functionality for Tinycards, I came up with a quick (but non-intuitive) method on how to do so using the Chrome web browser and Notepad++. See this article.

Migrating data from Anki to Quizlet is easy because they both have functionality to import and export CSV files.
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