What is a deck on Yalango?

A deck on Yalango is a collection of words, characters and short phrases you want to memorize. The individual entries are called cards, and each card has a target side (the language you're learning) and a source side (the language you already know).

Decks are the backbone of the site. They're what the games run on, and they're what feeds your spaced repetition queue.

What a card holds

• A target word - what you're learning.
• A source word - the meaning in a language you know.
• Optional custom fields for anything else: example sentences, gender, notes, conjugation hints. See Customize your cards with custom fields.
• Pinyin for Chinese decks.
• Optional generated audio, for Premium accounts.

What happens when you practice

Every card you answer in a game feeds your personal vocabulary for that target language. Each item builds up a level that reflects how reliably you answer it, and Yalango uses that to decide when to show it to you again and to generate exercises at a sensible difficulty.

This is why practice matters more than card count - a deck only becomes useful once you've played it a few times and Yalango knows where you stand.

Decks, tables and notebooks

• Use a deck when the material is a list of items with a meaning. This is the common case.
• Use a table when one word has several related forms, like a full conjugation.
• Use a notebook for explanations and mixed material rather than drillable items.

Getting started

Create a deck from the Create menu in My Library, then either add cards by hand or import an existing list. You can also save a public deck into your library and use that as a starting point.

Keep decks fairly small. Several decks of 20 to 50 cards are easier to manage than one of 500, and because reviews draw on your whole vocabulary rather than one deck at a time, splitting things up costs you nothing.