Ever felt your memory isn’t able to keep up with the task of memorizing everything you want it to?
It sucks right?
I have recently started using a program called SuperMemo to help me do spaced repetition of things I want to remember and have had enormous success using it to remember pieces of useful information or just random information I want to remember.
I want to do an experiment on myself to see if a) how well SuperMemo works and b) how it fares compared to simple flashcard use.
To do this, I need to come up with 150 Questions and respective answers. The first 50 would be in experiment a), with the 100 left being used on the faceoff in b).
Do you have any resources I can use to gather these Questions and answers? Ideally I would just need to copy paste each into the program so that I have no contact with them before the experiment starts.
Foreign language vocabulary is the most obvious choice. If you want to make the reviews easy, pick a language similar to your own and filter out the words you already know or can guess. If you want to make them hard, pick Chinese characters, which tend to flummox most study methods because they’re so difficult (while still being tiny, atomic bits of knowledge).
If you want to do Chinese, I can send you a list splitting the 150 most common characters into three equivalent groups. Just let me know the format you need for SuperMemo pasting.
Curious: why did you pick SuperMemo over Anki or Mnemosyne?
I have dabbled with learning Russian in SuperMemo but have found it really difficult because I don’t know how to read the words and how to spell them. Have you had any experience with this? Learning Chinese would be pretty cool, I just don’t know how to do it properly with this technique.
I am using SuperMemo because that’s how I started with it. I might use Mnemosyne, which I didn’t know about before. Will check it out now.
Anki is another spaced repetition program. It’s free and used by thousands of people. It has hundreds of flash card sets you can download covering a wide range of materials, not just foreign languages. I’ve used Anki successfully.
I have an outdated method but it works for me. I use Supermemo for Palm OS. It costs $19, and you have to have a Palm device to run it. (Ha Ha, but yes, I do.) They are pretty cheap these days. I have a total of 3590 Spanish/English vocabulary cards. I think I can share them with you if you decide to go this route.
I’m only semi-serious. This would really be a big hassle. Better to use Anki and download some flashcards, if all you want to do is test. (Use Skritter for Chinese if you want to learn Chinese.)
This might go against QS principles - but why bother testing this? As far as I’m aware, spaced repetition is significantly more efficient than simple flash card use - so why test it? Seems to me that it would just waste your time, which you could use testing other less established theories!