Will be on the lookout. Thanks for the heads up!

Looking into the .deb downloaded from ichi2.net it has 23 dependencies, and it must be libqt4 stuff that takes up the size.

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.

Anki is not Japanese-only

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:

I started to look into making the flashcard program available to the students I teach English to, and the people around me who study Japanese.

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.

If you don’t like it, you only have to open Anki once a day.

But I want to open it 2-3 times a day, but not have cards reappearing hours later that day. ^_^

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.

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.

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