Rote memorization. What a sucky thing. But it turns out there is a whole science to the process of using flash cards to memorize things. What's more, the process seems ideal for computerized mediation. In fact, the scientific process would fairly suck if you were doing it by hand with genuine paper flash cards.

Ok, so what's the science? It comes from a guy name Sebastian Leitner. According to Leitner, you should separate your flash cards into boxes which you review and test yourself on at different times. The first box is for cards you don't know at all. Higher boxes are for cards that you remembered, for example, from yesterday, or last week, or every time you've tested yourself. So when you are testing yourself on the cards in a box, if you get the card right, you put that card into the next higher box. If you get it wrong, the card goes back to the first box.

Seems easy and not that much trouble to do with real flash cards, except for the process of making the cards and the boxes and ...

But computers are a real aid for this sort of thing. A program can keep track of the cards and boxes, and it can tell you when you should review and when to test and select the cards for each, and it can handle present the cards for review or testing in a variety of formats.

That is, if anyone had written a program that does all that.

Oh, there are programs out there. Hundreds of them. Perhaps many hundreds of them. There is even a web site devoted just to reviewing the various flash card programs in existence.

Ok, here's where I get picky. I use Linux. BZZZT. There go hundreds of the programs reviewed on that web site. The vast majority of them are Windows based.

Additionally, I want to learn the Japanese Kana and maybe Kanji. (I don't have a good reason— I just do.) Therefore, I also want a program that allows images on the cards and can also test based on the images.

And I insist on being able to create my own flash cards and want to create them easily. If it even takes click, type, type, click to create a single card, chances are good that I won't be doing much of that. I'd far rather create a list in a text editor, then import that list, creating many cards at once. (More Unix heritage showing here, I guess.)

So far, I've not found anything that fits my bill: Linux, Leitner, images, import to create cards. There are a few programs that survive all but the Linux cut, though even they feel a little cumbersome while creating the flash cards. That combined with the fact that I rarely boot into Windows on my home machine and the point of flash card study is not to spend a lot of time studying, but to do so frequently, means that it would take an outstanding program under Windows to actually encourage me to reboot daily for reviewing or testing.

So what am I doing about it? Writing the ultimate flash card program of my dreams in Python on Linux? Ha! I'm not that good a programmer in general nor in Object Oriented Programming in particular. I can see the general shape of such a program, but the details are not occurring to me. And it is complicated enough that every start I've made has sucked so badly that I've abandoned all hope, ye who enter. (For the moment. Again.)

Currently, I am trying to use qvocab for the straight text vocabulary learning. It is Leitner based and can import (and export) from text files for easy flash card creation. It has no support for images. (Grrr!)

I am also using a program called gquiz for learning the Kana. This is a strange little program much in keeping with the ideals of Unix. It does one portion of the job. It reads a set of "questions" which are really just files in a directory, then calls an external program to present you with a "test" of that question. You have to tell gquiz yourself how you did, then gquiz will present you with another question. It is not Leitner based, but by calling external programs for the questions and using individual files for the questions it is very flexible on what it can test you on. I begin to have dreams of making a Leitner based program variation on this theme.