Mnemosyne is one of two free programs descended from a commercial flash card program called SuperMemo. SuperMemo exists but I found a number of references online to its being buggy and these two programs being better than it, so I didn’t pursue it. The other free program is Anki, which I will review in my next article in this series. See my overview of flash cards for some comments about why I think flash card programs are a really important part of learning Spanish.
In the title, I called this a Spanish flash card program but you can use it for learning any language. It’s rather a minimalist program, so that sounded nice and easy and I started out with it.
Mnemosyne – there’s something ironic about a hard-to-remember name like that for a memory-aiding program — has a simple, straightforward interface. Here is an example of a screen where I am trying to remember the Spanish for hookworms. (Why was I learning this particular word? One of our dogs had them not long ago and I made a paper flash card at the time. I was putting some of my paper flash cards into the program.)
At this point I ran into one of the limitations of this program. As I reviewed my cards, I wanted to type in the word for hookworms and tried to do it in the answer box, but the program wouldn’t let me. (It’s alfilerillos and I hope you don’t need to know.) I figured that I’d get the spelling better if I wrote it, but that is not an option with Mnemosyne. However, you could have another program open on your computer and type into it, Word or Notepad or anything of the sort.
Once you decide on your answer, and I was saying them out loud, you click on the bar where it says “Show answer.”
Below is another screenshot, just after I’d clicked in the bar for a different card. (As you see, you can input phrases and expressions just as easily as words.) Now that the answer is visible, the little bars at the bottom of the screen from 0 through 5 are no longer grayed out. You are to choose 0 if you had no idea of the answer, 1 if you didn’t know it or guessed wrong, and 2, 3, 4, and 5 for knowing it increasingly well. The tooltips for each number indicate your opinion of whether the interval of time since you last saw it was too long, about right, or too short.
The program uses these numbers to decide how soon to show you the flash card again. If I hit 0 or 1, I got the card immediately or very soon, before the program would go on to something else. Since I had input 51 items the night before, I finally cheated and gave some of the items a 2 just so I could get on with reviewing the software. (The way I know that I put in 51 items is that in the bottom right of the screenshot you can see where it says All: 102. Mnemosyne automatically makes two cards for each English – Spanish pair that you put in, handy for learning both ways.
The program uses a Spaced Repetition System (SRS) algorithm to determine how often to show you the cards again. You can review sooner than it thinks you need to, for example, if you are studying for an exam. I didn’t see a way to put everything on hold, like if you go on vacation.
I didn’t care about being able to add sound or graphics, but evidently you can. It can be used for learning Oriental languages; just the thought of memorizing those characters made Spanish seem like a piece of cake!
IN A NUTSHELL: A basic but good program which runs on Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X. Widely used and popular.
I might have stopped my search for my idea Spanish flash card program with Mnemosyne, but I wanted to be able to type in my answers right in the program… as a writer, sometimes I think my brain resides in my fingertips! I thought I’d rather have a little more control over the frequency of when the cards came up.
Also, I didn’t spot an easy way to type in Spanish characters like ¿ á é í ó and I found cutting and pasting them a bit laborious. Later, I thought I might have used a program on my computer that had those characters (Word probably does) and then just cut and pasted the whole words. Mnemosyne may have an import function too, where you could bring in lists with the characters.
ACCESS: http://www.mnemosyne-proj.org/
http://www.mnemosyne-proj.org/help/index.php is the documentation.
The option for “Getting Help” from either of these pages includes a link to the forum.
Here is a very long and detailed review of Mnemosyne.
PRICE: Free.
