Mnemosyne is quite limited in its features, but its open source status, its sheer simplicity and the strong focus on the core task of spaced repetition makes it a strong minimalist offering for students of language using windows and Linux, and with the recent appearance of a binary download for OS X, Mac users can now also use the application without having to go through the incredibly complicated source building and installation process.
Wenlin is the the best piece of software around for students of Chinese. Among other tools, it has a powerful and handy offline dictionary with very flexible and fast search options as well.
I know many students of Chinese that use Wenlin to get their definitions and input vocabulary into flashcard software. Most recently I saw someone do this in a coffee shop here in Taipei, and it brought back a lot of memories of me doing the same in Beijing almost a decade ago.
Wenlin doesn’t make it easy for you, however, to get the word entries into a format that can be easily imported into flaschard applications. There is no “export” feature, presumably because the developer doesn’t like the idea of large parts of the Wenlin dictionary getting out of the software and into a separate database. However, the lack of such a feature means that students have to copy and paste words from Wenlin and add their own tabs. In my case, I also like to delete the alternate hanzi to keep my flashcards more clean.
Although a more experience programmer with good regular expressions skills could easily take this further, I am releasing the results of an evening spent trying to learn how to program in the programming language Ruby:
Here is a screencast explaining how to use the script:
Wenlin Conversion Script Screencast
This script takes a text file with a list of Wenlin dictionary entries (Saved in TextEdit, not in Wenlin) and puts tabs between the hanzi and the pinyin and between the pinyin and the definition. It saves the converted file which can then be easily imported into your favorite flashcard program.
It is made up of two scripts: the convert.app applescript application which you is what you use to run the script and the convert.rb ruby script which does the actual conversion. You can customize three options in the convert.rb script. Just open it up and set the three option variables at the top to true or false according to your preference for that option. There is a description of what each option does in the ruby file but basically they control whether the alternate traditional/simplified hanzi are removed, whether the “|” character is changed to “Example: ” and the “~” in examples replaced by the pinyin of the word.
I haven’t tested this too extensively so if you see it do strange things with the wenlin vocab items let me know and I’ll tweak the script in the future.
UPDATES:
-I just noticed in the screencast that it split the word “fandong fenzi” and put “fenzi” into the definition - I need to update the regular expression so that it looks for the part of speech rather than a space to separate the pinyin from the definition. I didn’t realize that Wenlin sometimes puts spaces into its pinyin words. I’ll release this soon.
-I just updated a 1.1 version. See the enclosed Read Me file for things I have fixed and changed in this new version of the script.
I have tweaked the review grading a bit, making the final score an independently determined score out of 10, rather than a cumulative score out of 100. I have gone through and updated scores on existing reviews to reflect this. Next review coming up: Studycard Studio.
Mental Case is a beautifully designed new commercial offering in the flashcard software world from Drew McCormack that will cost you about $40. It offers excellent support for interval study, graded slideshows for both study on demand and interval study as well as convenient set management. While some of its features need further development, this is an promising debut. Read below for a detailed review.
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One of the more unusual offerings out there in the memory management software genre is Mindburn, which advertises itself as a personal knowledge system. As such, it is not strictly a flashcard application, but serves many of the same functions and this review evaluates it, perhaps somewhat unfairly, in comparison to other flashcard applications. The application is a commercial product going for just under $25 and its flagship feature is the ability to manage one’s knowledge through interval study. Mindburn provides a highly customizable scheduling environment for reviewing information that can be organized into multiple levels of folders. Ultimately the software is not an appropriate study environment for students of languages, though some of its sample data suggests it might be used for that purpose, but the application has enough interesting features worth praising to deserve the attention of other flashcard developers looking to brush up on their own creations. Read up for some of the more interesting aspects of this application.
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Genius is a free and open source flashcard application for OS X created by John Chang. It has a clean and simple design and is easy to work with. It uses the fill-in-the-blank method for study and distinguishes between a “learning” stage and a “review” stage for each card. It supports two regular fields, a “group” field, and a “type” field. Each card is assigned one or two scores, which are incremented and decremented when the card is practiced. Words can be assigned an “importance” which has some bearing on when it is chosen for review.
Overall, it is best suited for learners looking for a score keeping study-on-demand application that prefer the fill-in-the-blank method. However, due to its extremely limited and inflexible interval study implementation, inability to manage sets, two field limitation, and lack of a graded slideshow study mode, I can’t recommend it for serious long term language study and maintenance. The fact that the application is open source, however, creates an opportunity for any interested developers to pick up the torch and make improvements in the future. Read on for a more detailed review.
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I came across Ebbinghaus, an OS X flashcard application written by Christian Kienle, when I read comments here and there from fans of the software. Most of them seem to enjoy its simple support for images. It enjoys an interface that will be at home to any mac user, and indicates the “progress” of learning through a colored bar but I found the software to be buggy and its features fall far short of the Fool’s basic expectations. Ebbinghaus is currently free but according to its blog a new commercial 2.0 version is in the works with many more features that was due out early this year. I may have to update this review if there is marked improvement. Read on for more details.
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Anki is an open source flashcard application with full support for interval study that is available for Mac OS X, Linux, and Windows. Anki ain’t pretty but it has a lot going for it under the lid, offering language learners a powerful environment for reviewing large bodies of vocabulary over the long-term. Other flashcard application developers ought to have a good look at the many features this application has to offer, some of which can be found in more professional Windows flashcard applications but which in many cases have not made their way into OS X flashcard applications.
Anki’s strongest areas are in the many statistics it provides, its tagging features, its strong interval study centered approach, and its “card model” approach. Anki’s biggest weaknesses are to be found in the overall program design, its complete absence of set management features (in favor of a tags-only approach), relatively poor list overview and editing features, and the fact that it does not allow the review of vocabulary on demand. If your goal is long-term mastery of vocabulary and you are willing to get past some of its quirky behavior, this program can serve you very well. If you want a familiar Mac OS X design with a simple “enter and review” interface, then this may not be the best program for you. I would keep an eye on the further development of Anki, which is available under the GPL license, since future versions may resolve many of the issues discussed in this review (bolded text highlights problems). Read on for more details.
Some of the OS X applications I’m hoping to post reviews of in the coming weeks: Anki, Ebbinghaus, Mental Case, Genius, iFlash, ProVoc, Flash Cards, Mindburn, Mnemosyne, and Studycard Studio. I may eventually move to online flashcard services if I can cover these major offerings.
Managing Keyboard Inputs Methods
One problem that makes it difficult to quickly and efficiently enter large numbers of vocabulary directly into flashcard software if you are dealing with non-Roman languages is the fact that the user has to keep switching the keyboard input back and forth between English and the other language, whatever it may be. This is a problem for all the flashcard applications I have seen so far, with the exception with some older versions of iFlash.
I’m wondering if this is a completely insurmountable programming problem in OS X or if perhaps the Cocoa programming API does offer some way of overcoming this issue.
Today I found this in the reference for the NSTextFieldCell class:
setAllowedInputSourceLocales - Sets an array of locale identifiers representing input sources that are allowed to be enabled when the receiver has the keyboard focus.
allowedInputSourceLocales - Returns an array of locale identifiers representing input sources that are allowed to be enabled when the receiver has the keyboard focus.
I don’t know much about Cocoa programming but I wonder if these two things (OS X 10.5) or something similar can be used to help remedy the problem?
Also, programmers might want to read over this posting about keyboard events and non-Roman languages.