Leave a Review Brainscape
Brainscape is great...
... but I don't think it's the "only" flashcard app you will ever want. Anki is useful too, albeit in my experience only if you make your own flash cards. In Brainscape you don't have to. In Brainscape I have used only the pre-made Spanish cards, so that's all I can review: they're terrific.
A year later: I stand by my previous remarks: Brainscape has the best pre-made flash cards for learning Spanish that I’ve seen. BUT you also owe it to yourself to use Anki.
The two complement each other really well: you probably would not love making huge batches of Anki cards for every conjugation of a long list of verbs. No need: Brainscape already has them. But for learning new vocabulary, especially phrases (and things like idiomatic expressions) your own “bespoke” (get it?) Anki cards (¡with images!) can’t be beat.Show lessScott A
Developer Response
Thanks for studying with us, Scott A. We’re glad to hear that you’re finding using Brainscape useful along with your other learning tools! We’re continuing to work and improve Brainscape and hopefully soon it will be a one stop shop for you. We’d love to hear your feedback of any specific features you’d like to see in Brainscape. Feel free to send them when you have a moment to support@brainscape.zendesk.com. Happy studying! --CHSecond year with premium
No me gusta a pagar para apps, pero... enough of that. This marks the second year of renewing my premium membership and while the cost is a tad high, the quality and value make this app a bargain.
I’ve been using the app to learn (and relearn) Spanish and have found my ability to speak and to comprehend others speaking in Spanish vastly improved without being fully aware of my own progress.
The Spanish course is 5 courses and there are several other Spanish courses available for download and study.Show lesstommyp7
Great App
Have used Pimsluer, Rosetta Stone, Babel, Duolingo and others. This app is about "learning" Spanish, not "studying." With this app you quickly see your weak points/strong points and know what you need to work on.
Support is better than I have seen in a while. Had a problem after paying for the app, upgraded from the trial version within the app. The upgrade did not take affect. One email and had a response within an hour. Fixed the problem within minutes. This happened on a weekend, wasn't expecting a response till Monday. Great Support!!Show lessTveillon
Very helpful app overall with some glitches
The overall app is quite good and provided me a valuable certification study aid that is more portable and flexible than a stack of 3x5 cards. The breadth of available topics is huge and the cost reasonable. Ease of use and fast downloading of decks get positive marks.
On the downside the decks that I made use of had some inaccuracies and errors. While there is a mechanism for submitting feedback it is very glitchy and relies on the user to know realise the error exists. While it’s probably understandable that given the breadth of topics available that internal company monitoring for accuracy is not feasible it means that “buyer beware” prevails and the quality of a deck appears dependent upon whoever uploaded it in the first place for the quality and accuracy of questions and answers.Show lesspcborup
Excellent App & Company
I’ve been using Brainscape since 2013. It’s a great app to increase memorization and learning. Their flashcard algorithm maximizes fast and easy memorization. They also have a wide range of card collections: Latin, GRE vocabulary, Geography, Music Theory (including Ear Trainers!), Spanish, French and many more. It’s a great way to learn basic vocabulary for a language. Also to study for exams such as the MCAT and CPA. They are also an excellent company with good practices. I recently had an issue with them and it was resolved quickly and easily with excellent communication. Highly recommended.Show lessSKC
So happy I stumbled upon this app again
I used to use this app all the time and deleted it after a while. I recently stumbled upon it again and I’m so thankful because this is one of the only flash card apps that allows you to rate how well you know a card so you don’t have to waste time studying cards that you already know. This is going to be extremely helpful for my anatomy class because I have up to 200 flashcards for just one of the six chapters needed for a single test !Show lessVaZ333
Only 25 Cards a Day
In high school I’d use this app for hours and hours a day and felt so proud to be learning so much about subjects that we didn’t learn in school. There didn’t used to be a limit to how many cards you could see in a day.
I’ve been using this app loyally for years, and am now a junior university student studying biochemistry, coming back to Brainscape to study for the MCAT. 5 minutes into studying, I get a notice saying that I’ve used all of my cards for the day and must upgrade for more.
I feel like 25 cards is such a low daily allowance for something that used to be completely free and unlimited; I went through 25 cards in 5 minutes.
I used to love this app so much and have always recommended it to my friends, I was so excited to use it to study again, but I didn’t know that these changes came around and will have to find another app to study with.
So sad to see it go.
Update: I wouldn’t mind paying $2.99 a month for 12 months if it only charged the $2.99 each month rather than $36 at once. It’s hard to let go of $36 as a broke college student, whereas I can skip a coffee a month in order to pay for the upgrade, and maybe the app locks you into a contract where it charges every month and you can’t cancel. I think a lot of people would agree with this and you’d gain a TON of subscribers if you implemented this. You could only gain money this way, and more people would be able to learn using this app.Show lessMelissaDann
Pretty interface but missing basic functionality
Like I said, it’s pretty. I love the interface. It’s also nice that you can have multiple decks within one course. It keeps track of your mastery level which is great. However it’s missing several basics:
- it’s difficult to import cards from excel and word. This should be a basic function. You have to jump through a bunch of hoops to import the right file type, encoding, and format. It’s not fun.
- once you create a deck, you can’t change the order of the cards in the deck. If you want to add a card it goes to the bottom of the deck. This is terrible when you want to organize an outline and you forget to add a card. You would have to copy cards, create a new deck, delete the cards in the original deck, paste cards from the new deck into the original deck Ughh... that’s just if you forget once. Imagine wanting to add several new cards.
- the pc version does not allow you to browse the cards in order. You are forced to use their spaced repetition algorithm. You can browse on your mobile device but not your pc. That’s annoying af especially when studying a subject that contains many layers like law: rule, elements, exceptions, examples.
I paid for the full lifetime membership assuming these basic functions were included. Silly me.Show lessyoubreakyoubuy
So much to learn, so little time
The subjects I am working on now:
Chinese Vocabulary and ‘Survival Chinese.’* Why? Because I live in an apartment complex with about 80% occupancy of Chinese graduate students, who all speak English, but why shouldn’t I learn some of their language? (*Gotta love that name!)
Knowledge Rehab Why? Because high school and college were a long time ago! (62 yo now)
World Geography Why? Because when we had geography in the early 70’s, they didn’t think it was important to cover anyplace but North America, Europe and a little of the Middle-Eastern countries. Oh, sure, they pointed out India, China (they called it Red China back then!) and Australia. Oh, they included Egypt and South Africa in the list, also. Of course we all knew about North and South Vietnam, but most couldn’t point to them on a map. So, since I never learned much about the rest of the world, and since many of the names and boundaries have changed, why not learn something?
Brainscape is for people who want to learn something specific and for people who just want to learn something new and for folks who want to “brush up.”
Yes, it’s true that some decks are better than others. But all I’ve seen are an improvement over ignorance or incomplete knowledge. Why not learn something starting today?Show lessSkayell
Worth buying premium if in college
Have been using the free version for years and it has helped me passed multiple tests and exams, but once I came to college I realized the premium price wasn’t too much of a steal if it meant passing classes. The ability to shuffle, reset confidences and the random mix are essential to my studying practices, and I believe the algorithm is what makes this app the best flashcard app.
Small problem that has never been resolved for years, using an ampersand (&) while writing cards in the app will result in Unicode when studying those cards (and&).Show lessbadboys213
