Today, I finally got a chance to sit down and read something that was not work related. On wired.com, I found an article about a guy named Piotr Wozniak who was struggling to learn English and ended up creating an adaptive program called SuperMemo. Basically, it’s a flashcard program that keeps track of what you forget and keeps stats for you. Now for anyone else out there who has a ton of stuff to memorize, something the knows what you don’t know is quite useful. Sure, you could just make two separate stacks for the things you know and the things you don’t, but how about if you have thousands of cards? Or how about the kanji you can read, but not write? Or the ones you can translate, but you don’t know the Japanese or Chinese reading?
This lead me to an open source program called Mnemosyne that can take that into account. I am trying it out right now, but I plan to write a little review about it. I will say one thing about the the program though: if you have a test next week, the techniques behind SuperMemo and Mnemosyne will not work for you. It’s made to put the info into your long term memory which usually takes time. Cramming is out, but once you go through the process, you should be able to remember the stuff for years. That’s a lot more valuable.
