There are some people who pick up languages naturally. I am not one of them. At some point I have to buckle down to brute memorization of vocabulary. The traditional tool for that is a box of flashcards. I did this for a while with Irish, but they are unwieldy and I have way too much paper following me in any case. Furthermore, there is the effort of managing the cards–purging the words you already know and adding the new ones.

What I have come up with is to replace physical flashcards by an Excel spreadsheet. This is not a very original idea, but my little Nokia 770 internet tablet runs Gnumeric, a spreadsheet program that can read Excel files. With this gadget I can carry all the flashcards I want in my shirt pocket and study them at any odd moment–on the bus, in the waiting room, whatever.

Furthermore Flashcard Exchange has a lot of electronic flashcards for Irish, including chapters from some of the books used by Gaeltacht Minnesota. I cheerfully paid $19.95 for a full membership, which allows me to download all of these in Excel format.

So now have all the flashcards I can handle, available at any time. I have no excuse for not working on my Irish vocabulary :-)>