Vocab program?

February 2, 2008 10:57 AM

I'm looking for a program to help me revise foreign-language vocabulary.

I learned Chinese years ago, and I'm revising it. I keep a list of the words I've forgotten in emacs, and look at in Mozilla. (For some reason, emacs will let me enter Chinese characters which it can't subsequently render.)

Until now, the list has been short enough that I've just been revising the entire thing at each sitting. But that's no longer really feasible. I'm looking for a program which'll let me enter my own vocabulary, and keep track of how often I've been tested on each word, favoring the most recently entered words and any with which I've recently had trouble.

UI-wise, this program can be pretty simple, so I may end up writing one myself, but it would be nice to find a program which already incorporates a good testing schedule, as there is scope for a lot of sophistication in that respect.

Ideally I'd like the program to be platform-agnostic. Currently I'm doing my revision on a computer which runs windows, but I won't have it too much longer, and then I'll be using OS X or debian.

posted by Coventry to education (8 comments total)

Note to American English speakers: in some other dialects of English, "revise" means what you would call "review."
posted by grouse at 11:09 AM on February 2 [1 favorite]

Thanks for the clarification, grouse. I didn't know that usage is rare over here. (I am still hard at work on strengthening my American English, too...)
posted by Coventry at 11:13 AM on February 2

Anki is what you're looking for. When you create a new "Deck" of flashcards, you define a repetition system. When you are being quizzed, you rate how easy or hard it was for you to recall the answer. If it was hard, the system will reschedule the card to be reviewed in 1/3rd to 1/2 of a day. If it was not hard or easy, 3 to 5 days. If it was easy, 7 to 9 days. If you totally forgot or made a mistake it will reschedule the card for 10 minutes. If you made a mistake on a "mature" card (one that you're reviewed and got many times before), I think it reschedules it for 8 hours later. The net result is that you review each card a number of times, but based on how easy or hard it is for you to recall that card it will be scheduled a longer or shorter time in the future. You will not be reviewing the whole of your stack every time. However to make best use of it you would have to use it a 2-3 times each day, or else reconfigure the default spacing settings.

This is known as a "Spaced Repetition System", and a flashcard system using it was described by Sebastian Leitner. This formed the basis for Anki (and other similar software).

The program runs on OS X, Linux, and Windows.
posted by splice at 11:38 AM on February 2 [3 favorites]

Looks perfect. Thanks, splice.
posted by Coventry at 11:42 AM on February 2

Only problem is that when I try to drag and drop Chinese characters from my existing list into Anki, they render as small, square, black dots. But this problem is probably best addressed by asking the author of Anki.
posted by Coventry at 12:02 PM on February 2

I've had no issues with Windows once I had installed the East Asian language files (which I'm sure you've done if you can see characters in other applications).

Some issues with inputting characters directly in linux for me but copy/paste gets me through. Sorry to hear you're having trouble.
posted by splice at 12:09 PM on February 2

I've got it working, now. It was a simple error on my part. Thanks again.
posted by Coventry at 12:37 PM on February 2

There's also SuperMemo, Genius and Mnemosyne.
posted by Zed_Lopez at 3:44 PM on February 13