5 March 2019

Flashcard Madness: Learning to spell

Ben Talking To GrandmaDuring work I sometimes need to spell unknown words. These might be names, e-mail addresses, foreign words or technical terms. The situation might be on the phone or during mob programming sessions, where I am unable to write the word on a white board or a chat window.

Spelling can be complicated and needs practice (as seen in these Developer Melange recordings outtakes ;-). To avoid confusion and to spell consistently I settled for the ICAO/ITU/NATO Spelling Alphabet. As I recently fell into flashcards - hence the title Flashcard Madness - and I created a deck to learn and practice spelling. I use Anki digital flashcards. The apkg files can be used with Anki for Windows and Android and AnkiApp for Mac and iOS.

This deck for English Spelling contains cards for the English NATO Alphabet, e.g. question spell D is answered by Delta. I added some (recursive) spelling exercises to the end of the deck, e.g. question spell Delta is answered by Delta Echo Lima Tango Alfa. Because of "madness" I went on to create an additional deck for Austrian German covering Deutsches ÖNORM A1081 Alphabet.

Download English_Spelling.apkg and Deutsches_Buchstabieren.apkg here.