Memorise These Cool And Useless Facts On Tinycards

I learned the NATO phonetic alphabet. Now I’m learning how to point to every country on a map. I’ll never need this information, but it feels cool to know. I’m learning on the free flashcard app Tinycards, which feels remarkably like playing a mobile game, but one you can feel good about. Here’s the best pointless knowledge you can pick up on the app.

If you feel addicted to any time-wasting mobile apps, Tinycards is a great replacement. The slickly designed app from Duolingo gives you the same trickle of dopamine that social media and mobile games do. The minimum time you need for a useful Tinycards session is about 30 seconds. Don’t try to learn anything tough or wordy (unless that’s your thing). Try these simple things that are kind of cool to know:

• NATO phonetic alphabet: Spell things aloud like a fighter pilot. Great to pull out during customer service calls.

• Countries of the world: Learn where every country is, and what it’s shaped like, continent by continent, with these cutely drawn official decks. Oceania is weirdly missing, but someone else made a deck.

• Tarot cards: Learn the names of the major arcana — the 22 “face cards” of a tarot deck. Then learn their upright and reversed meanings.

• Pokémon: Identify the first 151 Pokémon. If that’s too easy, learn them by silhouette. Or learn 2nd-generation Pokémon.

• Minecraft entities: Know the people, creatures and places of Warcraft for Kids.

• Harry Potter spells: Cast 86 spells, or at least learn their names and what they do.

• Disney parents: Learn the names of all the parents from Disney animated films.

• Logical fallacies: Become one of those annoying people who wins arguments on a technicality.

• Cheeses: Identify cheeses on sight like some kind of Steve Urkel savant.

• Patterns: Spot argyle, jacquard, houndstooth, damask, imperial trellis, and more. Impress your friends by pointing to the floor and shouting “Nice quatrefoil!”

• Deep sea creatures: Learn what a vampire squid actually looks like.

• Greek gods: Learn each god’s name and what they were the god of.

• Golden Age Hollywood actors: Tell Bette Davis from Lauren Bacall.

• 500 unusual words: Like a word-a-day calendar, but this time you’ll actually memorise the words — words like aleatory, raffish, and decocted.

Unlike a basic flashcard app, Tinycards controls what cards you see and when, using the scientifically optimised spaced repetition method. This helps you memorise things better, but it also means that when you blast through a set of cards for the third time, you feel like you’re beating a video game level that always killed you before.

There’s even a way to adjust your difficulty setting: Sometimes you’ll run into a deck where you already know half the cards. Mute the easy cards with the eye icon, and you’ll only get the more challenging ones.

Tinycards is great if you can find a pre-made deck. If you want to make your own cards for real studying, you might prefer other flashcard apps like Anki. But if you just want to find something cute to learn for fun, Tinycards is your best bet.