The holy grail flash card program or service? Please....

I've been on the look out for YEARS for a good flashcard program -- free or commercial. I combed through download.com and freshmeat. Never found anything I liked and the few that came close couldn't handle unicode (which made'em useless to me). Sourceforge had a few promising attempts, but not ready for prime time. You'd think a flashcard program would be a trivial hack. Not so! Good luck. I'll keep watching this thread in case someone had better luck.

I'm late to the party, and I haven't tried all the available flashcard programs out there, but I picked up Vtrain a year ago and have been very pleased. It isn't perfect--but most of the problems are user made. The key points are that anything that you can put in a Rich Text Format (RTF) file, can be put in the cards--and of course, you make your own. This means my cards have Hanzi on one side and pinyin on the other. Furthermore it has a commenting feature. The comments are bits of text you put on the card between some marker characters (The default is open "/*" and close "*/" so /*this*/ is commented) and you can choose what symbols mean "commented". The commented text is not displayed during a review session, unless you turn it on with a keystroke or by clicking on a little lightbulb icon. This way you can give yourself a hint for when you almost know the answer. Another fantastic feature, you can put pics in. But even better, you can attach sound files. My standard Flash card has Hanzi on one side in a 28pt font, pinyin on the other in 12pt (using numbers to mark tone like: pin1yin1). I have identical comments on both sides of the flash cards--the English meaning. Then I also attach sound files of the word being spoken. Also you can flip the cards so that the answer side is now the question side. There are options for importing wordlists from RTF docs (you can make them in wordpad!) but read the directions on formatting and spend some time figuring out how to do it efficiently. The downsides are that you have to set up your own intervals (but it keeps track of what cards are up for review using a sort of virtual stack of shoeboxes) and the file management system is a little janky at first. I managed to make things difficult for myself because of where I chose to save my files.

Hi AEFLOW Thanks for the recommendations. Tried the Wenlin but I couldn't figure out how to pull up a word list and run flash cards! I think perhaps that neither love nor money will get one a really good chinese flash card system with the bells and whistles...otherwise it would presumably rank in google, which i have tried with no luck... chinesepod......perhaps a commercial opportunity here?? Cheers, Punter

I've taken to simply entering my word lists into a spreadsheet. Not the ideal method, but I can shuffle'em up and -- if I do find a good FlashCard program -- I'm ready to export the master list. If I get too tempted to cheat (ie: peek, since the columns are side-by-side) I simply turn off the font color rendering it invisible until I highlight it with the cursor. Again ... klunky. But what ya gonna do?

Punter, Wenlin only does flashcards for individual characters, not for words. SuperMemo sounds really interesting, it seems like flashcards on steroids. The items to be reviewed can be anything, including images and diagrams. Internally it apparently works out, on the fly, the optimum frequency to present each "flashcard" item, so that well-remembered items are seen at longer intervals than poorly-rememberd ones ("repetition spacing"). The only thing is, there seems to be, er, almost a bit of a cult-like aspect to the website, which is a bit off-putting. There is perhaps too much emphasis on memorization and mnemonics. But if you just use it for the "flashcards on steroids" aspect without buying into their overall philosophy, it may be what you're looking for.

In Wikipedia under the entry for "spaced repetition" there is a listing of dozens of links for flashcard-type programs. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spaced_repetition Many of them seem to be Unicode-compatible, and some of them seem to be for PDAs or iPods in addition to PCs.

I used Supermemo for a couple years, and it *works* but the interface is just not good. Not good at all. Buggy and slow and way overengineered. The principle behind it is solid, though. If you're using a PC, check out Mnemosyne -- it's free and based on an older but still good version of the Supermemo algorithm. I have some friends that are using it for Chinese and they're fans (I'm a Mac user and was never able to get it working, so I don't have any personal experience).

I use Jmemorize (www.jmemorize.org), which is free and runs on java so should work on anything. If you're only interested in cards with two sides (as opposed to hanzi, pinyin, english definition as seperate ideas) it does repetition spacing and offers a few different import/export methods. I'm thinking of switching to something more like supermemo though because it calculates the repetition spacing for individual cards differently, there're some characters that never seem to "stick" for me and I think a more optimized approach may help..

johnB Hi. Is it possible import my chinesepod vocab lists into supermemo? Also, can it be set up so that i can choose to show only the hanzi character if i want? Is it hard to get this set up for a non-tech attention deficit disordered ren such as me? Thanks for your help..... Punter

Just tried ZDT but I don't rate it because there is no intelligent management of the card inventory.....just review and manual discard, which I can do already with the cpod online system.......

Wenlin ( http://www.wenlin.com/ ) has flashcard functionality built in to it (it's not a free download though). The flashcard functionality does four things: 1) given the pinyin, guess the character (multiple choice) 2) given the character, guess the pinyin 3) given the character, guess the pinyin (multiple choice) 4) given the pinyin, guess how to write the character In fact it goes through all four in each session, you can't choose to do just one. It's a bit lacking in flexibility. Wenlin also has the ABC Dictionary (DeFrancis, University of Hawaii) built in, so you can cut and paste text into it and then instantly see dictionary definitions just by moving the mouse cursor over any word. Someone once recommended SuperMemo ( http://www.supermemo.com/english/summary.htm ) but I haven't used it. It's a generalized periodic-review software program of some kind, not specifically just flashcards.

Thanks goulniky i will try. I tried the Mnemosyne program recommended by john, but its definitely not ready for prime time as you need more than my average tecnhical skill than i have to figure out how to import lists and there is no basic stock of vocab lists offered......the quest continues!

punter, I agree with goulniky on Pleco. It is customizable so that you can choose which combinations of hanzi, pinyin or definition you want to display on either side of the card and you can configure it to do multiple 'ranks' of spaced repetition like supermemo. You can store separate lists as well. You can import/export lists with your own custom definitions or just feed it the hanzi and let the ABC dictionary automatically supply the rest. The new version is supposed to be out soon with even better features. There is a help pdf which explains a lot of this on their site and a forum. I also agree that the main guy behind the product, Mike Love, is very responsive. I can provide more help in configuring the flashcards if you decide to go that route...

I think making your own flashcards is the best way to go. It is good because you can add your own example sentences for how to use the word in context on the back side... also, the writing is good practice. If you want to learn Hanzi, I recommend you write the characters you are learning over and over until you are nauseous, and then repeat as they come up again....constantly be reading, as you will connect the words you see in a natural environment to what you have been studying and the shit just zaps into your head....its weird...So I know you were looking for a good program for flashcards, but I made my own and it helped very much (although it takes a crapload of time no doubt). But I think repetetive writing is key....for myself, Ive noticed the characters Ive written over and over seem to be burned into my mind or something crazy like that....PEACE!

I use plecodict too but it has a few limitations.. I like to set up multiple stacks for different purposes, hanzi -> pinyin(english), english -> pinyin(hanzi), english+pinyin -> hanzi... and you can't effectively do that in pleco at all. You actually can't effectively do that in anything I've found without a lot of cutting and pasting and rearranging of your cards actually, but I've learned to live with that.. What I want is something with repetition spacing that's designed for chinese, or more accurately that's designed to study chinese the way I want to study it.. How do most of you use your flashcards? Just Hanzi -> pinyin/english or what?

@benw, When I was studying hanzi directly, I would make two cards, one with the hanzi as the question and pinyin/english as the answer, and one reversed -- the first for recognition, the second for writing.

@punter888, I'm sorry, I'm not really sure how to import into Supermemo. I haven't used it for quite some time now, and I remember that unicode support (and thus Chinese character support) in everything but the flashcards themselves (i.e., importing) was a bit sketchy. Sorry!

I recommend: iFlash for Mac, jMemorize for Win/Mac/Linux, Supermemo+CKJOS for Palm (only BIG5/GB import possible). Plecodict is also great.

Thanks all for the comments. So many recommendations it will take me a bit of time to learn how to deal with the software, etc, and give them a try. Its clear there is no Holy Grail program as I would have hoped. Johnb.......please tell the powers that be that this is certainly a commercial opportunity for a multi-product technology centric language instruction company! cpod could integrate a system into their content that really rocks, and everything else out there is very user unfriendly and/or lacking full features! They'd surely capture a good share of the flash card market, and probably end up selling instruction to people who may only have been looking for flashcards!

I am not a b ig fan of flashcards so I can't really make any recommendation based on personal use, but I'm surprised nobody mentioned Plecodict. Maybe because it' Palm and PPC/smartphone based, but it does have a sophisticated flashcard toolkit, dict is based on ABC just as Wenlin. There's also a new version coming up soon that is supposed to have extended flashcard functionality, and IK think at some point they are also considering a desktop version. check http://www.pleco.com/ they also have a forum, very responsive