Supermemo

The program that made mass vocabulary learning possible for me is Supermemo. Supermemo is a flashcard program with one real handy feature. It learns from your answers and uses the information to adjust the testing rate for individual cards. This means that you don't get tested for easy words like da4 all of the time. Instead you concentrate on harder words like interrogate or impeachable (they may not be hard for you, but you get the idea). This greatly increases the number of flashcards you can have. For example, I have 6214 active flashcards in Supermemo. Think about how you would handle this many flashcards on paper or in a simple flashcard program. You can't review that many in a day or even in a normal week. If you try to cram them all in, you will waste a lot of time on words you learned a long time ago. One can try solutions like retiring old words, but what if you think you know the word but then forget it? With Supermemo, today I was only tested on 90 out of the 6214 words, and they were the words that needed testing.

Supermemo handles the problem by giving each card a difficulty level and a date for the next test. Each day you are given a set of cards to go through. After answering a question you grade your performance on that card, from A through F. "A" means that you answered correctly with no difficulty. "F" means that you not only got it wrong, but you don't even remember ever knowing the answer. There are degrees of knowledge in between. Generally if you get an A through a C, the interval to the next time the question shows up will approximately double or triple. If you get a D through an F you will see the question again tomorrow or the day after. The grade will also cause an adjustment to the difficulty level. The actual degree to which a successful answer is pushed into the future is based on the difficulty level. The lower the level the farther into the future.

After taking the daily test, you are drilled on the questions you got wrong. The drill continues until you get all of the answers correct.

Supermemo is available for Windows, Palm OS, and PocketPC. I use the Palm version, which is very handy because I can work on the daily test anytime I have a few free moments. The Windows version has a number of extra features, but none making it worth me using instead of the Palm version.

The documentation for Supermemo is a bit obscure at first. The authors don't explain the process of using Supermemo real well, but rather emphasize menu options and learning theory. Here is the flow for how Supermemo works:

1. Enter some words into Supermemo. At this point they will not be included in any test. You can run drills on them if you wish, which is like using classic flashcards. This is only useful for initial learning or cramming.
   
2. As you learn words, you want to commit them. This means that you know the words well. Nothing will happen that day in Supermemo as a result of committing the words.
   
3. The next day when you run Supermemo you will find that you will have a test containing about half of the words you committed yesterday.
   
4. Take the test and grade yourself on each answer. After the test, do the drill on the words that you got wrong.
   
5. The next day you will have the rest of your new words in the test, as well as half of the words you got wrong yesterday.
   
6. Every day take the test and drill. Over time the number of words in your daily test will decrease unless you are adding new words.
   

There are three methods to adding words to Supermemo for Palm OS. You can enter them into the program on the PDA, you can convert them from the Windows version , or you can convert them from a comma-separated-values file. Entering large numbers of words on the PDA can be tedious but it is fine for a small amount. I have never tried converting words from the Windows Supermemo, but once converted you can't bring them back into Windows, and there is no conduit, so there is no real way to coordinate the two. Converting a CSV file is fairly straightforward. Enter the data into a spreadsheet and save it as a CSV. You then the file through smconv.exe to get the PDB file.

Some people gripe about Supermemo. They scoff at the science that the creators say underpins the application, and say it is just another flashcard program. I don't actually know if the science is correct or not, but the program works well enough that I'll take them at their word. Another common gripe is that you can't easily reverse the questions. If you want both Chinese-English and English-Chinese cards for a word, you need to enter the data twice. This is true, but it is a reasonable trade-off for Supememo's card management. Since Supermemo keeps statistics on each question, it needs separate entries for each one. There is a way to reverse a drill, but this really doesn't help any. A final stumbling block is the daily grind of the tests. The key is to stick with it for a week or so and see how quickly the number of questions in the daily tests goes down.

As much as I like the program, I have a few gripes and wishes.

• Supermemo resizes fonts using its own algorithms. This works well enough on the Latin alphabet, but it makes some Chinese characters hard to read. I wish it would use the built-in font sizes.
  
• It would be nice to be able to export a database to a text file, just to get an overall view of how you are doing.
  
• A conduit between the Palm and Windows versions would be handy.
  
• It would be nice if the data files were interchangeable or convertible between the Windows, Palm, and PocketPC versions. I'll stick with Palm forever because I don't want to start over with a fresh database on another platform. This isn't a problem because I like Palm OS, but it does feel restrictive.
  

You can get a demo copy of Supermemo but it won't give you the full effect because it won't do testing, only drilling. It is cheap, though, with the Palm version costing only $16. Whatever form of the program you use, I strongly recommend any student of Chinese, or any other language use the program.