I have tried a ton of methods for learning foreign languages over the years — audio only, grammar intensive, books, audiobooks, videos, computer apps, etc. They all have their little gimmick — no studying, guided situations, games, etc. And at the end of the day, the simple flashcard method (with audio) works the best at having something to say in the moment you need it and on the tip of your tongue. Brainscape takes it further by offering curated professional flash cards courses for Spanish and French, plus smaller subsets of offerings (like verbs only or nouns only) for other languages like Mandarin or Italian. I wish they had entire courses in all the popular languages, because their method works best, it really does. Their method of progressive training, interval recall, and 5-level self scoring works quite well at getting you to recall words and phrases you need to learn while moving past the stuff you already know. Plus I can create my own sets of flash cards and hook audio or picture content to them and then share them with others. All in all, there is no better method for learning a foreign language.

It hasn’t changed much over the years. It’s too bad, Apple forced a bunch of apps to consolidate if they had multiple apps for one concept. In this case, it’s language learning. Many companies that had Spanish, French, German, etc, language apps sold separately, had to consolidate all languages into one app. During this switch to the new format many apps offered a way to restore purchases. I will admit, many of my language app purchases and the app upgrades were purchased at discounts or during a free unconditional purchase, but I have lost some of the old in app purchases that I had previously. Some of my previous unlocks were for a full set (complete course) or all decks of study cards, and now I seem to only have the first or first few decks. It’s not really a big deal as I have been using other language learning apps in place of Brainscape. I will say,, the spoken content is clear compared to other apps, but it really is simply a digital study card application. I’m not really sure what I’d get for the $200 per year PRO upgrade, but $200 per year gets you a lot of upgrades with a bunch of your language apps compared to just this one, and other apps have tests/quizzes and study material that utilizes voice recognition to analyze your speech when determining if you answered correctly. I consider speaking the language more important than memorizing flash cards

Update after 9 months: The text to speech feature was promised for 2025, but it is still not here. I am starting to look for an alternative app. Very disappointing. Update after 6 months: I am still waiting for the text to speech functionality. Not sure why it’s taking so long, there are so many other apps that have this built-in. I am taking away one star and will switch to another app if this is not added soon. ORIGINAL REVIEW: I have tried many flashcard apps over the years and this one truly stands out for the ease with which one can create and review cards. What I really like is the seamless synchronization between the browser version and the app version. I use the browser version to create the cards by copying and pasting material from various sources. Then I switch to the app version for the actual learning. I am using the free version and I am not missing much in terms of functionality. The one feature for which I will be very happy to pay a lifetime subscription for is “text to speech.” This will be especially helpful when learning foreign languages as you can have one side of the card being read out in English and the other one in the foreign language, for example German. I hope to see this feature soon.

I LOVE this app!!! I’ve used it for the MCAT, throughout my first 2 years of medical school and am now using the pre-made USMLE deck for my board exam prep. I love the percent mastery metric. It is ALWAYS within 3% of my exam scores (including the MCAT)! I only wish there was a plug in or connection with Picmonic that allowed quick search of Picmonics. 100% prefer the spaced repetition algorithm over Anki! I don’t need to fiddle with settings. Brainscape shows me what I need to see when I need to see it. The search function for terms is ok, but I wish I could search and it would leave the list of results up instead of having to search the term again after looking at the first one. Also, I preferred the browse mode from the older version. When I do a quick review for exams I just want to flip through them. But this new version only shows a preview and you only have the option to study the deck from that card. Please allow for quick edits in the app. Overall, I am very happy with the new version!! It is much quicker!

This app has great potential. It allows me to go over words that i don’t know over and over again until it becomes solidified in my head. I almost considered buying the premium version of the app. However, as much as Brainscape is a great app for its flash cards, it is extremely buggy. First, it relies heavily on its internet connection. If you try to study these flash cards while in the middle of a commute and the mobile network becomes spotty it crashes when you finish. If you want to double check a meaning on a card and you quickly switch apps and come back, the app freezes. It somehow saves progress which I assume is due to its constant connection to the internet, but my inability to switch between apps while memorizing is hindering to my learning process. I even tried to find a way to contact someone from Brainscape to talk about these things, but for some reason it says that there’s no email attached to the app even though when I go to my account my email info is in there. There was even a Brainscape representative that emailed me to promote the premium version so they do have my contact info so why doesn’t the app reflect that. I love the way the app works and would like to use it for a longer period of time, but if these problems persist it’ll become hard for me to do so.

I’ve used Brainscape on and off for years, and it keeps getting better every time I return to it. They have high-quality content for just about any topic. It’s great for test preparation, general curiosity, knowledge refreshing, and exploring a topic before going into it more deeply through books or other study—and thus it also gives you a solid grounding if you do go more deeply. It allows real learning to happen when you don’t necessarily feel like doing traditional study with books, notes, highlighting, and all that. It allows you to basically be puttering around on your phone—but productively!I wouldn’t say it’s necessarily the ultimate flashcard service. I use a different one (the big Q) for when I want the various study modes that that one provides, but I don’t WANT Brainscape to do anything differently than it does. I love its simplicity and consistency in how you interact with the content. And it’s extremely simple to find excellent quality content to study (UNLIKE with the big Q).

The interface is ok. I don’t really use the algorithm/system of reminders. I just study whole decks at my own pace. But the stock Spanish Course is really really good and the reason I pay for a subscription. Two main requests. 1. Please make a dark mode. It’s so bright at night with the white background and I like to use as lying in bed. Almost every other app I use regularly has this feature yet I pay more for this app than anything else on my phone. Frustrating. 2. Please let us flip a flash card without hearing the audio. It makes no sense that you can’t turn this off. I like to listen to music while flipping through cards but it stops the phone audio to play the card and doesn’t return to the song or whatever is playing. It’s also annoying when I flip through while somewhere I don’t want the audio playing out loud as I need to turn the whole phone volume off. I’ve seen this requested for a long time and seems simple to offer. Please make these simple things happen!

Im trying Brainscape, I’m a lifetime member and I’m trying to being able to say I support this app but the devs are making it hard. They refuse to listen to feedback from longtime users. They changed it because they wanted to and not from feedback. Here is a great little piece of feedback, being back the confidence setting in the browse mode. It went from one keystroke to set confidence in a card to four. I.e. when I first set up cards I like to go through and set my predetermined confidence. I used to be able to just do that automatically in the app on the side via a drop down menu . Now, I have to open the card up, flip it over, rate confidence, be sent to another card, flip it over, rate it…oh wait, you rated your previous card a 1, you have to see that one again….or, you have to back out of browse mode, scroll down to the next unrated card and repeat the process all over again. It’s stupid. If you bring back one thing or change one thing, WHICH YOU SHOULD!!! Bring that back. It makes the app unusable. At this point I would rather ask for a refund and go back to quizlett.

This was literally my favorite app until it was “updated” a few days ago. Now, my investment in creating dozens of lesson plans is down the drain. Fundamentally, it just doesn’t work. When I try to bring up my lessons I get an error message. I have to sign out, sign back in, then download all the lessons each time I use it. Once I do get it to work some of the most important features have been eliminated. For example, reverse testing is a must for language learning. You need to test for the vocabulary both ways. That’s been eliminated in this version, basically rendering it half useless. The card formatting is all screwed-up with words that were formerly in lists now just running together. I’ve had to go in and reformat dozens of cards. In the old version it would run through the card stack in order. Now i get repeats before all the cards in a test appear. I could go on and on but what’s the point? My subscription is up in a few weeks and I’m not sure what I’ll do. A week ago I wouldn’t have given it a second thought, but the new version is basically unusable for me so I need to start to explore alternatives.

This is on the verge of being a really amazing program. But there are several issues that I wish were different. It doesn’t seem to be that seamless going between different screens and different decks. Additionally, it feels like there’s some things that can be done on the mobile app that can’t be done the website and vice versa. For example, I have never been able to figure out how to reverse a deck on the Website. I have also not been able to duplicate a deck on the mobile app. Maybe both of those are features, but they are so well I have spent hours trying to figure it out and I’m not been able to. It should also be way easier to create a new deck that would be a sub deck of another deck. So for example, if I have 50 items in a deck and I want to take it down to 10 that are giving me trouble but keeping. Full 50. The only way I’m able to do that that I know of is to duplicate the file on the website, and then delete 40 of the cards that I don’t want. All of this is a lot of work and it feels like there should be a way easier way.