Early in the Autumn 2008 season, I wrote about a method for aquiring a random, but natural, spread of vocabulary from watching raws. My vocabulary list from that season ended up between 600 and 800 words (not much), spread among Kannagi, Toradora, and Ga-Rei. Though, I had issues…
About half-way through the season I lost the nerve to put new words into a my Always Flash Firefox script, as I was studying two other sets of vocab simultaneously; 3 sets all together kanji, a jlpt list, and the raw-encounters. Unfortunately, it’s a pain in the ass to study 150-200 cards at one time in an unweighted flashcard environment. Luckily, after searching the web about kanji writing practice, I ran into a program called SuperMemo, then I recalled Caitlin praising Anki, so I searched for a comparison.
With this I found a review of the big 3 big contenders to spaced learning, SuperMemo, Anki, and Mnemosyne. SuperMemo is clunky and costs money, though it may have a better algorithm, it seems like more headache than benefit. So disregarding SM, my basic pros/cons are as follows:
Anki
Pros
- Highly customizable
- Supports tagging and models
- Kanji, pronunciation, meaning on cards
- Ported to Maemo, and almost every other system
- Popular and supported
Cons
- Possibly too much exposure/tinkering of the algorithm available to users
- Scheduling is hourly-based, does not account for sleep interval
- Seemingly targeted at studying Japanese
- [see edit]
Mnemosyne
Pros
- Stupid-simple interface
- Simple grading scale (no time)
- Schedules daily
- No algorithm adjusting
- Seemingly a research application into memory
Cons
- Where’s mah Maemo version
- Silly GUI toolkit in linux (SCIM doesn’t work)
- Not a lot of bells and whistles
Personally, Anki seems more like the Windows Control Panel, where a user needs to/can change things, but could cause a lot of trouble. Also, I don’t like the default behavior of the user having to choose when the card should appear next. Conversely, Mnemosyne is way too simple, and hardly has anything to configure, but it serves exactly it’s purpose. My only drawback to Mnemosyne is not having a port on Maemo, for my N810, and it’s GUI toolkit. There really isn’t a win situation, but I prefer the core and simplicity of Mnemosyne (daily scheduling, efficient grading, timing for missed/new words to appear).
In terms of learning, I think Mnemosyne has a slight edge, because hacking memory is the primary focus, and it’s little differences of way feel more logical. The good news is that the data can generally be moved between the two programs, so if I really do need that Maemo port, I can always go to Anki.
The Point
You can use these to learn all the faces and names of every Touhou character.
I may not have mentioned the point of using these sort of tools, but it comes down to having a generic, managed, flashcard system which will aid in learning from multiple sets of input.
Categories in these applications allow the grouping of items from whatever source (a set of kanji, vocabulary from an episode or full season, or just a regular JLPT list) and activate them with a few clicks. Once activated, they mix in with the other categories and learning takes place across all categories.
There is no need to single out specific sets, as it’s all a big learning pool, and that’s where the real benefit lies. Use SRS!
Edit: Anki supports both learning in order and randomizing, which is nice.
Hi, I’m the author of Anki. Mnemosyne is a good flashcard program and I want people to use the system they like best, but I just wanted to clear up a few points.
Anki is not Japanese-only, and it’s used by people to study law, biology and other sciences. Could you let me know what gave you that impression?
Anki tries to make everyone happy. There are people who want to study once a day after sleep, and people who want to review new cards in the morning and then again in the evening. The default settings are such that if you review at night, the card will be ready the next morning. If you review two a day, the card will be ready that night.
As for per-second scheduling, many people prefer that. If you don’t like it, you only have to open Anki once a day.
And as for randomization, Anki supports learn-in-order and randomizing when learning new cards, and the option is in front of you on the first screen you see when you start the program. Subsequent reviews are shown in the order they are due, just as in Mnemosyne.
Finally, Anki’s algorithm doesn’t need adjusting either. You can leave all the settings as they are and it will function in a way similar to Mnemosyne.
Cheers,
Damien
Actually, I used Mnemosyne for a while beforehand but Anki won out because it let me sync to an account online, meaning I could study while at work (or any other computer, for that matter). The auto-generation of hiragana/katakana was really nice too because I hated typing things out twice (unless Mnemosyne’s added this feature). However, it’s clear that Anki isn’t Japanese-centric - there are plenty pre-made sets that span other languages. I think some updated screenshots might dispel that. I’d have more to say in defense of my favorite study system but I think Damien covered that.
[...] bookmarks tagged half japanese Mnemosyne and Memory saved by 9 others leopard001 bookmarked on 01/19/09 | [...]
Hi Damien, glad to see your comment!
It only seems like it is one of the primary targets.
I understand that it is a general SRS application, and can be used for any sort of flashcard. What gave me the impression as to targeting Japanese language learning was mainly the user-base, which most often appeared to be learning Japanese, as well as the auto-generating kana feature.
Also from the site:
Naturally, pre-made decks will span many focuses, as making these from a general list is rather simple. So I don’t believe it is only for Japanese language, but is just seems to cater it. Of course, this is a good thing for learning Japanese.
But I want to open it 2-3 times a day, but not have cards reappearing hours later that day. ^_^
Ah, this is good to know. I edited the post and took Randomizing off the cons, but I have a question. Is this option per-category or application-wide? I guess if it is application-wide then having in-order would be best, then importing pre-randomized categories would be the key to getting randomization when wanted.
@Caitlin
Yes Anki has a more modern and better feature-set; fact. The online sync isn’t an issue for me since I can just expose a server for the sake of hosting/syncing the Mnemosyne db. With a little scripting this becomes automated, or even an anonymous web-service.
The draw comes with Maemo. I’ll likely use Anki in the future simply because it has better bells and whistles, but I really value the sheer simplicity of Mnemosyne. Also, when I go to install Anki via Synaptic… it wants to install 370MB of software dependencies. Mnemosyne, is similar, but only 38MB.
The order to show new cards is configured on a per-deck basis.
As for 370MB of stuff, it sounds like you’re getting a lot of stuff not actually connected to Anki’s core libraries. Compare the Windows installer which ships with all the necessary libraries and comes in at only 20MB. The Mnemosyne installer in comparison is 5MB, but the majority of the extra space is taken up by the graphing library and HTML rendering library. Mnemosyne is moving to Qt4 in Mnemosyne 2.0, so it will probably end up being the same size anyway.
I think the python-qt4 dependency is wanting to install various things, or different python extensions in general. Not an issue on Anki’s part, but I’m wondering why?
Looking into the .deb downloaded from ichi2.net it has 23 dependencies, and it must be libqt4 stuff that takes up the size.
[...] my last post about spaced repetition software, I advocated Mnemosyne. I’ve thoroughly used Anki for the past couple weeks to see what the difference is [...]
[...] is why kanjis/vocabs found in titles are so much easier to remember. Oh, and not having known about Tools to aid in memorization beforehand was a total [...]
I just ran across this website while looking for info on the Anki port to Maemo 5, and thought I’d give you some updated information. As of this summer’s Google Summer of Code, there is a Maemo port of Mnemosyne, although I don’t know if it has stabilized yet, nor if it targets both Maemo 4 and Maemo 5. Details are here => http://wiki.maemo.org/GSoC_2009/Projects/Mnemosyne_for_Maemo
Code is on GitHub. If you’re interested in it, contacting the author to see what his plans are would be your best bet. I was vaguely thinking about trying it at some point, so if you want, you can fire me an e-mail, and I’ll let you know if I ever do happen to build it to try it out.
Cheers,
@Ffejery oh very nice. I’ll have to check it out, but heeding the unfinalized db notice. From the shots it looks to maintain that simplicity, which is awesome. The adding feature is also great. I’ve been using the anki-maemo mostly on the go, but the lack of editing is somewhat a drawback. The normal anki version runs a bit on on maemo.
Will be on the lookout. Thanks for the heads up!