Marios Braindump

After reading this article in the Wired Magazine, I got interested in learning with spaced repetition. Assume you want to learn a particular subject, e.g. spanish vocabulary. You might want to write your word-pairs (spanish/english) on flash cards and practice regularly. It has been shown that you both speed up learning and improve retention if you review your flash cards in predefined intervals. For a particular card, the length of such an interval is determined by the number of its reviews and the graded ability to recall the vocabulary. Spaced repetition lets you remember your facts for years, but you must learn very regularly. About 10 minutes per day will do. Learning and reviewing can be done either by hand or, more conveniently, by software.

I currently attend a spanish course and want the same as most language learners: to remember as much of the vocabulary as long as possible. Woudn’t it be nice to have a tool or webservice which allows all course attendends to use the above thechnique to learn the vocabularly and allows each of them to update the vocabularly list after the courses in order to share the work? Well, I would really like such a thing. In the following, I’ll explore the software landscape for tools that might aid here.

Before I begin, let me briefly fix the requirements for such a tool. It should provide

1. quality – a good algorithm for learning and remembering vocabulary using spaced repetition
2. groupware functionality – each user should be able to update and use a common list of vocabulary
3. portability – the vocabulary and the trainer should be availabe to the users anywhere at no or little cost (no copying of files or installation of software)
4. usability – the tool should be easy to use, not bloated, provide keyboard shortcuts for flash card handling and the ability to easily insert new vocabulary
5. language course synch – the words shall be incrementally updated along with course

There is a bunch of tools out there, but too many to take a look at all of them. Also, requirements (3) and (2) are quite important to me, and the best way to avoid file handling and installation steps is a hosted service that requires few more than logging into a website. So let us only regard the 4 most valued or promising tools that (might) support online training or synching: SuperMemo, Mnemosyne, Crammage and Anki. I will only assess them with respect to above requirements.

SuperMemo is the old-stager in this round as the software is out since the beginning of 90s. It provides the richest features set and I assume their algorithm is the most polished one. Since a couple of months there is a new online version (which is still beta) that supports the creation of own courses and the possiblity to share those with the community. SuperMemo is the only commercial product amongst the 4 and also offers language courses at cost. Creating own courses, sharing and reviewing them is free in the online version, though.

Just since very recently the online version supports editing of courses after they are published. A course cannot have multiple authors. Maybe a new account accessible for all course attendands could be created, but I am not sure if this is allowed by their Terms of Service. As far as I know, it is not possible to import and upload vocabulary. This is the major drawback for me, as insertion of new words via the webinterface is quite tedious.

Second, we have Crammage. It is the sole web-only tool and its rigid Ajax-based implementation appeals to me. Unfortunately, it does not support either multiple authorship nor keyboard handling, hence not fulfilling two requirements. Well, and the design needs getting used to it, too…

Mnemosyne is an open-source project, and the software is quite nice and feature-packed. It seems to be the tool of choice for many people. However, is does not provide a online trainer nor does it support synching of courses. I wont dig deeper into this tool since the disadvantage of having to send around  updated courses weighs too big for me.

Last, lets turn to Anki. It took me a while to find out that they also offer a online version. As I dug deeper, I realized that this one really is a great groupware application. You can use both the online or local version (available for Win, Linux and Mac), and sync between both with a single mouse click. Sweet! Your decks of flasg cards can be shared with other people – just share your deck and send around the deck ID. Any card you add will appear in their decks as well. Note that you have to subscribe to their deck in order to get cards they add, too. Anki also has a textfile import function that comes in very handy. Lastly, both the offline and online version feature a pleasant keyboard handling.

All in all, Anki is the software that best meets our self-set requirements. Cammagone and Mnemosyne cannot be really considered as they fail in fundamental requirements. SuperMemo’s new online version seems quite nice. Anki may not be as advanced as SuperMemo, however, it beats the SuperMemo beta with its great text import function and its keyboard handling. Please let me know about your experience with these or other tools.

Tags:english learning | Filed on December 28th, 2008 | 3 Comments »