Mnemosyne – Spaced Repetition Learning
June 17, 2008
Memory is the mother of all wisdom.
- Aeschylus
We all need to remember something, but, inevitably, we tend to forget new information. To improve your memory I recommend a book by a psychology professor Dr. Kenneth Higbee – Your Memory : How It Works and How to Improve It. This is a good book with techniques applicable for many purposes, especially for students. However, today I want to tell you about one specific technique called spaced repetition.
As you can see from the graph, we retain only a small percentage of information, but we can overcome this by reciting. For example, actively recalling a word periodically will keep it in the long-term memory. The question is when this reciting should take place? Piotr Wozniak conducted research on this topic and came up with a nice algorithm. He wrote SuperMemo program to help people improve their memory. This program is good, but is not very reliable due to bugs and crashes. No problem, some nice people wrote an excellent open source free alternative.
“The Mnemosyne software resembles a traditional flash-card program to help you memorize question/answer pairs, but with an important twist: it uses a sophisticated algorithm to schedule the best time for a card to come up for review. Difficult cards that you tend to forget quickly will be scheduled more often, while Mnemosyne won’t waste your time on things you remember well. The software runs on Linux, Windows and Mac OS X.”
Mnemosyne uses SM2 algorithm from an older version of Super Memo, but it is still good. The advantage of Mnemosyne is that it is open source, free, and has some datasets already. Importing and entering your own data is easy, and the interface is user friendly. I’ve been using this program for some time and very pleased with the results.
You can either enter words and their definitions on your own or you can load an already existing dataset. For example, you can load most commonly used GRE words and it will test you on that set or you can load most commonly used words or kanji in Japanese for example (for JLPT).
Think of it as a deck of flash cards. You use it the same way as flash cards. The problem with flashcards is that you don’t know when you need to test what for optimal retention. This program serves this purpose. It quizzes you on the cards you likely to forget soon. This way you’ll get around 90% retention.
Good luck in your studies! ^_^
Hmm sounds interesting. Gotta try this when I get home
So what happens when you’re me?! ^^ And forget a majority of things only for it to be remembered days later when you least expect it? XD It doesn’t seem cool!
It looks like you are pushing many things into subconsciousness
If you use that program your retention will be improved significantly 
This way you’ll remember things when necessary instead of after a random interval 
Sounds like a digital version of flash cards. Thank goodness I discovered this post. I shall give a try on this program.
There are many flash-card programs, but the main advantage of this one is spaced repetition algorithm.
[...] I mentioned before, Mnemosyne is an excellent learning tool. Someone was nice enough to enter some of the most frequently used [...]
Wow this looks really cool ^-^ Certainly a step up from the common flash card
Yes, it is much better than flash cards, I am find it very useful in my Japanese study
First time I heard about the Mnemosyne software…but it sound interesting though I never used flash card for my japanese study before. I’ll try to download it later..
Mnemosyne is a multipurpose program that can be used to study various topics
The website has hiragana and katakana sets as well as some vocabulary ready for download.