Of course you know how paper flash cards work, for learning Spanish or anything. You turn them over and see if you had it right, then make piles of which ones you know and which ones you don’t. I thought I was pretty creative a few years ago when I started putting my homemade cardstock Spanish flash cards into three piles: I know, I kinda know, I don’t know.
The flash card software you can get online takes that simple idea of
evaluating how well you know a particular card and takes it way further than just three piles. One popular free program, Mnemosyne, gives you six levels to chose from:
- one if you really don’t know it
- one if you don’t know it but are beginning to get it
- and four levels of knowing it increasingly well
Anki, the other free program I reviewed is similar, though it may have a different number of levels or describe them a bit differently.
So once you’ve got some words or phrases to learn and they are divided up according to these different levels, the behind-the-scenes power of computer programs works its magic. Using different algorithms, or ways of analyzing the frequency with which to show you the cards, the programs order how often you will see a particular card. If you have marked it that you really know it, you likely won’t see it for weeks or months. If you can barely get it right, chances are it will be in tomorrow’s pile. And if you still don’t know it at all, the program may toss it back to you within a few minutes.
Both of these programs draw on algorithms from a commercial program called SuperMemo. It’s reported to be quite buggy so I didn’t explore it. For a long and intriguing article about SuperMemo and its eccentric creator, see Want to Remember Everything You’ll Ever Learn? Surrender to This Algorithm at Wired Magazine’s website.
The flash card program I am using, VTrain, doesn’t have the algorithms built in but you can set them yourself. I’m fiddling with this, and think I like the feature – even though it’s not obvious what the ideal rhythm would be.
