Comments on: Farewell, SuperMemo; Hello, Anki.

By: Nathan

Nathan — Thu, 18 Mar 2010 20:05:48 +0000

I’m just about to hit 40,000 items, and I’m learning Chinese now. Supermemo rocks!

By: gersapa

gersapa — Sat, 27 Jun 2009 04:08:13 +0000

The day I say Supermemo for the first time (2005) an immediate knee jerk reaction made run away. But happily I read many articles about expertise and practice makes perfect style, the creators itself say SuperMemo is not for everyone. I personal think that good software design could make this program the ruler of all, for knowledge management, learning and recalling. 2007 I saw again this program, and I’ve regretted not starting to learn how to use it at once. It’s been a long struggle, for sure more then it should be, but overall there is noting more powerful. Currently I have 17,000+ learned flashcards (medicine, neuro-cognitive science, mostly) and have 35,000 pending for this year.
For vocabulary only, I find anky and fullrecall the best. Anky for its price as well as a little modification on the hard items on short interval repetitions (although, this cramming has not proven a good practice in the long term, a least makes you feel it works) and the sm-2 algorithm is to old and ineffective, it can’t and doesn’t now you’ll forget something, no SRS’s software does.
Fullrecall is small, portable, simple, online also, and has a better algorithm (neural network based), price is only small contrariety (but not much), I like current implementations, like the clipping function but compare to Supermemo is just a newbie.

Bottom line, for me supermemo is to complex, but worth learning in order to study anything not only vocabulary. For only vocabulary my love goes to anky (but I have installed three times and never used more than a week).

By: Nathan

Nathan — Wed, 19 Nov 2008 15:42:07 +0000

I have used Supermemo for more than 3 years. It has many bugs, it has a poorly designed user interface, and it has been frustrating (I stopped using it twice and started using it again). I have gotten used to it’s weird problems (Which has been QUITE a learning experience), but despite this I am happy beyond belief with it. I have nearly 25,000 flashcards, I can speak, read and write Japanese fluently and I am currently learning Chinese. But beyond just languages, Supermemo has become my “safety net” for anything I want to remember. I would likely have switched to another simpler program by now (Such as anki or the like), but I no longer want such a program for ONLY words, but for ANYTHING I want to remember (Hence why I have 25,000 flashcards) I don’t think other programs have the degree of versatility that I want; even though the GUI is bad, I’m willing to put up with it with the tradeoff in being able to do more stuff. If I find an interesting fact on the ‘net and I think “I want to remember that,” I just put it in my “to remember” text document.

Supermemo might not be for everyone (That’s for sure), but Supermemo was made for me.

By: KIM TAE HOON

KIM TAE HOON — Fri, 31 Oct 2008 06:35:30 +0000

Hi, I am come from S.KOREA

I am really frustrated at SUPERMEMO2006 . I struggle nearly 1 year for using supermemo . Supermemo has a lot of bugs and its interface is bad
In addition, its statistics is too complicated to understand.However, I agree with their algorithm and I think it works fine …

When it comes to me, ANKI is the nice and neat flashcard application. It is simple but powerful enough to study my materials..I like it!!

By: Nate

Nate — Tue, 30 Sep 2008 01:49:22 +0000

Hi Josh,

Thanks for such a quick response!

No worries. I just wasn’t clear if you had done what I’m trying to do or not. If you do spend time on it, please not too much

From the research I did, it looks like I’ll either be transferring by hand (with the help of AutoHotKey, which I was already using to supplement SM’s interface) or I’ll have to bite the bullet and find a way to extract from the OEM XML data or the HTML data.

At least I’m not up in the thousands or tens of thousands of items! It could always be worse.

By: Josh

Josh — Mon, 29 Sep 2008 15:35:32 +0000

Hey Nate,

When I switched to Anki, I actually didn’t import anything. I largely abandoned my SuperMemo deck. I still have it in HTML form, and occasionally, I’ll re-enter some stuff into Anki, but mostly, I just started over from scratch.

I’ll see if I can figure out a way for you to get your stuff into Anki, but I’m not sure if it’ll be possible. I recall running into a similar problem when I tried importing SM stuff to Anki; all of my Cyrillic showed up as ???, because SuperMemo doesn’t support Unicode.

By: Nate

Nate — Mon, 29 Sep 2008 14:11:26 +0000

I’m hoping someone can help me because I’m about ready to lose my mind. I’ve made the decision to switch from SuperMemo 2004 to Anki for a variety of reasons which aren’t important.

What’s important is that my collection consists of 715 items which I really REALLY don’t want to re-enter by hand into Anki (it’s bad enough that I’ll have to re-enter the memorization factor for them all, but I think it’s worth it to switch).

Here’s my problem: My only option for importing into Anki is a Tab-separated list. SuperMemo 2004 can export a Q&A file which can easily be converted in Excel. HOWEVER, SM2004′s Q&A export does NOT support Unicode. Therefore, each kana and kanji is saved in the resulting Q&A.txt as ‘?’

The other options for exporting from SM are:

a) XML, either trying to convert OEM to Unicode and failing using every code page number I could find even remotely relating to Japanese OR leaving OEM as is and getting a thoroughly unusable raw-spew file of XML code.

b) HTML, which saves out in quite a few fractured files, which are still no more useful because they are in machine readable format.

Sorry about the rant; it’s just that after 6 hours of Googling and trying every last thing I can think of in SuperMemo, I’m about ready to throw myself or my computer out the window.

So,

1. Josh, when you switched over, how did you do it?

2. Do you know anyone else who may have had a similar situation who might have an idea?

Again, sorry for the rant. Anything you might know is much appreciated.

By: Josh

Josh — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 19:48:00 +0000

Hi Johanna, I'm not sure if it's what you're after, but there's a Spanish deck on the Anki Wiki Extra Decks page. Description:

1000 ish Spanish Verbs, Vocab, Phrases, questions, etc. No particular order. Will update when I hit 2500 cards/facts

By: Johanna

Johanna — Thu, 26 Jun 2008 18:46:26 +0000

Hi from Germany!
I’ve been using Anki for learning Japanese Kanji. Now I am looking for a Spanish deck for Anki. Does anybody know where I can get one from? Or do you know anyone who has started one? I don’t really want to start off scratch… Thanks for helping =)

By: Josh

Josh — Wed, 18 Jun 2008 12:42:48 +0000

Indeed, thanks for linking to that Joe. I’d seen that before, but when I went to link to it to answer Ek01′s question, the Wiki was down.

So: thanks again!