You don’t have to start from nothing
Your cards come about in three ways, and all three end up at the same place. Which one you take depends on how much work you want to put in and on the material itself.
Way zero: take a finished deck
The app ships with a deck store, and everything in it is already on your device with the app. No account, no download, no network: you tap a deck, and it becomes an ordinary subject in your collection, with your own learning states.
Twenty-six decks come along. Twelve on constitutional law, one for each language of the app and for the matching state, with the reference in the constitutional text on every card. Twelve for French, from A1 to C2 and in both directions, with pronunciation, gender and the pitfalls in the note. Plus biology and physics for year ten.
Once you have taken a deck over, it belongs to you. If the deck changes in a newer version of the app, your subject stays untouched: from that moment they are your cards, not ours.
Way one: type them yourself
This is the direct route and for many people the best one, because a card carries exactly one thought. The front holds a question that is as short as possible and the back a brief answer. And lists you are meant to recite in one piece are better broken up into single cards right away.
You remember cards you wrote yourself more reliably than sentences you copied, because the writing is already part of your learning. Anyone who writes down a question has first worked out what matters about it and what can safely go. No program takes that groundwork off your hands, not even one with AI.
Way two: with an AI
Qardbox does not generate any cards itself, and that is a deliberate decision: a built-in AI would have to send your material to somebody else’s provider. And Qardbox sends nothing away.
Instead you get the tool in your hand, namely a ready-made prompt for an AI of your choosing. And what happens there is your call: which provider you use, what you show it and which of the generated cards end up in your stack in the end.
- Copy the prompt in the import area.
- Paste it into an AI of your choosing and add your topic.
- Save the file it hands back.
- Open the file in Qardbox and import it.
A second reason for this route is quality, because automatically generated cards often turn out too long and too wordy. And when the file passes through your hands, you see beforehand what you are letting yourself in for.
Way three: a file from your computer
If you already have a collection, from another learning program or from a spreadsheet, you simply load it straight into Qardbox. That way you type nothing out again and keep the order of subjects and categories you already had.
| What | How |
|---|---|
| Required columns | Question and solution. Nothing more is needed. |
| Also possible | Category, note and subject. |
| Separator | Semicolon, tab or comma. Qardbox works it out itself. |
| Column names | Found automatically, in German as well as in English. |
| Without a header row | Works too. Column one then counts as the question, column two as the solution. |
Qardbox does not work together with any other app and recognises your file purely by its format and the contents of its columns. And before the import you see exactly how many of those cards are new to you and how many Qardbox skips.
When your material is in no ready-made app
For school English and basic vocabulary there are language programs by the dozen. For what you actually have to say at work, there is none. The circle of people is simply too small for that, and this is exactly where writing the cards yourself pays off most.
Technical language and set phrases at work
You handle a language in everyday life and still come unstuck at work over thirty sentences that always run the same way. The greeting on the phone is one of them, and the handover report, and the formula in written correspondence. You do not learn phrases like that from a course, you learn them through repetition.
A card then carries the situation and the phrase that goes with it. Qardbox does not know your material and does not judge it, so it makes no difference to it whether there is a single word on the card or a whole sentence.
Vocational training and the exam at the end
In many trades there is knowledge you simply have to have. Rules are part of it, and limit values and definitions and procedures. You need no elaborate learning strategy for that, just dates on which you have to remember.
When your school or your employer hands out lists as a spreadsheet, that becomes a stack of cards in one step. And because the file stays with you, you can pass it straight on to the people learning alongside you, without anyone having to create an account for it.
Backing your cards up and putting them back
Under Settings, Privacy, Save data copy you create a complete copy of your cards. Restore from data copy puts them back, and Qardbox automatically backs up your current state first. What comes out is an ordinary JSON file that you can store and open anywhere.