Show HN: Cranki – Crosswords meet Anki flashcards
cranki.appHi HN!
I am sure most of you have heard of Anki flashcards? Using spaced-repetition is one of the best ways to learn more vocabulary when learning a language.
However, I find flashcards super boring. I've been playing some crossword games in my target language, Spanish, but I wished that I could use my custom list of words that I've come across instead of random words.
That gave me the idea to create this mini-app. It's super simple. Add your words and you get *unlimited* crosswords with spaced-repetition! If you get a word right you won't see it for the next few days.
Works with any language (I think). You can add words one by one or import a CSV (just make sure to follow the columns: word, answer)
It's a PWA, so you should be able to install it via your browser and it should work offline!
There's still some bugs and QoL things to add but let me know what you think! Nice job. As someone who practices foreign languages daily and is also a huge fan of the New York Times daily crossword, I'll offer some feedback. This is essentially more of a "projection" of the standard question/answer format and misses what makes crosswords engaging: the clues. Since the clues are basically just straight definitions, they’re just never going to be very interesting. You could try using an LLM to dynamically generate more interesting clues that still lead you to the target word you’re studying, but then you have to factor in costs/etc. > Works with any language (I think). Well... no. It's obviously going to work with a logographic language like Chinese. Thanks for the feedback! Yeah, it's more of a flashcard-crossword rather than a real crossword. I will have a think about how I can make the clues more interesting. I wanted to make this simple to use (and free) so adding an LLM in there might complicate things. Thanks for trying it!