Pharos: flashchards memo

A word comes back exactly when you are about to forget it.

Pharos works out that moment for you. Not "revise everything on Sunday", but each word on its own day. The better you know it, the less often it appears: ten minutes, then a day, then a week, then six months. The time you save goes to the words that actually resist.

FOUR WAYS TO REMEMBER Flashcards — recall, then check yourself. Multiple choice — when you need the shape of the answer. Typing — write the translation; the check forgives case, accents and stray spaces, because punishing you for something it is not testing teaches nothing. Listening — hear the word and recall it without looking.

PRONUNCIATION, NOT JUST TRANSLATION Any word is spoken aloud in one tap, in the voice of the language you are learning. Every card has a pronunciation field and room for an example sentence with its translation — for Greek that is half the point.

YOU CAN SEE WHERE YOU ARE A daily goal ring, a streak, four months of activity, a two-week forecast of what is coming, and a breakdown of your vocabulary by maturity: how many words you know solidly, how many are still settling, how many you have not started. Words that keep slipping are flagged separately — those are worth rewriting, not showing forever.

YOUR OWN WORDS IN THIRTY SECONDS Paste a list out of your notes or a chat — "word — translation", one pair per line. Dashes, colons, tabs, semicolons and commas all work. A third column can carry the pronunciation. You see how it parsed before anything is saved.

BRING YOUR ANKI DECKS Pharos reads .apkg files and Anki's plain-text export: both sides of the card, pronunciation, examples, tags and the review intervals you have already earned. It writes them back out too — an .apkg that opens in Anki and AnkiDroid.

A SET CAN BE HANDED OVER As a .pharos file — plain JSON you can open in a text editor and still read in ten years. As a link with the whole set inside it, which no server ever sees. As a QR code: point a camera at it and the words are on the other phone, with no internet and no accounts. Or build the set on the web when the list is long and a keyboard is faster.

NOTHING IN THE WAY No accounts, no sign-up, no ads. Everything works offline and stays on your device. The interface is strictly black and white: the only colour is a language flag, and only where a flag explains faster than a word which side of the card is Greek. Dark mode is a true inversion, not a dimmed light theme.

English and Russian interface. Russian ↔ Greek by default, but the pair is yours to choose from 35 languages — English, German, Georgian, Japanese, Latin and more.

φάρος — lighthouse. The one at Alexandria was visible thirty miles out and stood for sixteen hundred years.