Review of BYKI
Before You Know It, the language flashcard program by Transparent Language
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BYKI (Before You Know It) is a flashcard program from Transparent Language, designed primarily for learning languages, but can be used for studying and memorizing facts on any subject. It comes in a limited free version (BYKI Lite) or a full version with extra features and can be purchased and downloaded from Transparent Language.
How Does BYKI Work?
The program is quite simple. It comes with lists of vocabulary, with audio, organized by topic. Each list is, let's say 10-20 vocabulary words or phrases on a topic. Topics include - Basic Greetings, Polite Phrases, At the Restaurant, Verbs etc.
The program will flash a word and play the audio (pronounced by a native speaker) accompanying the word. You guess the answer. The program tracks how many times you were shown that word and how many times you got it correct. It will then show words that you get correctly less often, and words you haven't seen as much more often until you've seen them all and until you get them all correct.
There are also different learning modes. More passive, like seeing the word in your target language first and guessing the English and more active like seeing the word in English and coming up with the word in your target language.
Why buy the deluxe version when I can get BYKI Lite for free?
The free Lite version is limited to only about 10 - 15 lists or so, and has limited features. It's a great way to try out the program and see if you like it, or just try out some basic vocabulary in a new language. And yes, you can get free lists for the Lite version for more than one language.
But the Deluxe version comes with over 100 lists with more than 1000 words and phrases, and has some additional features.
One smart feature is that the Deluxe program is editable in a few ways. You can create your own lists. You can take the words (and their accompanying audio) and arrange them in different lists to make them more personal so you can focus on the topics or word groups that you want.
You can even create whole new lists, adding new words and even adding audio. In this way, you can create a very large library of vocabulary words (with audio or pictures) for your target languages. You can create lists for other languages or even other topics besides languages. And you can share created lists with other BYKI Deluxe users.
My experience with BYKI
I've used BYKI Deluxe for Spanish and Swedish. In fact, I have an older version of the program (they have upgraded and improved BYKI since I got mine) but I still use it. Don't expect to learn a language completely with it, but do expect to use it a little every day as it can be addictive and a great complement to almost any other language method!
Overall, I'd say that BYKI is a useful and versatile flashcard program. Transparent Language has an enormous library of languages and they offer BYKI for dozens and dozens of languages, some very obscure and some for which there are no other published language programs! And they are regularly adding new ones. Try BYKI Lite in a language you want to learn and see for yourself!
BYKI is available in Afrikaans, Albanian, Altai, Arabic, Armenian, Azerbaijani, Bashkir, Belorussian, Bengali, Bosnian, Bulgarian, Buriat, Chechen, Chinese, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dari, Dutch, English, Estonian, Farsi, Finnish, French, Georgian, German, Greek, Haitian Creole, Hausa, Hebrew, Hindi, Hungarian, Icelandic, Indonesian, Irish, Italian, Japanese, Kazakh, Korean, Latin, Latvian, Lithuanian, Luxembourgish, Macedonian, Malay, Mirandese, Mongolian, Norwegian, Pashto, Polish, Portuguese (Brazilian), Portuguese (European), Romanian, Russian, Scottish, Serbian, Slovak, Spanish, Swahili, Swedish, Tagalog, Tajiki, Thai, Turkish, Turkmen, Tuvan, Ukrainian, Urdu, Uzbek, Vietnamese and Zulu.
"Science and technology multiply around us. To an increasing extent they dictate the languages in which we speak and think. Either we use those languages, or we remain mute."
- J. G. Ballard
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