I’m taking a Spanish language class, in prep for an extended trip next year, and I’ve been wanting a great flashcard program. I found it in Genius (Mac only), which is Freeware and exactly what I wanted.
I had been using iFlash which was good except for the fact that it sometimes chokes on importing accented characters. It was particularly nice to use the integrated flashcard library with thousands of premade flashcard decks. However, it was just a flashcard program. Very straightforward.
Genius uses a spaced repetition system to coax recall. It keeps asking you the same cards, spacing them out longer and longer the more you get them correct. What’s more it uses a “fuzzy” matching system, so you can ignore punctuation and accented characters when you type the responses.
I really see some progress in my language vocabulary acquisition now, in a very short period of practice. This is exactly the program I wanted.
Technorati Tags: language, flashcard, icard, genius, mac
2 responses so far ↓
1 Jake // Apr 25, 2008 at 6:10 pm
Hey — I’d like to try genius, but I don’t want to type in a bunch of vocabulary.
Think you could put your spanish vocabulary words up for download?
2 KML // Apr 26, 2008 at 9:30 am
I am going to write a review of some different flashcard apps soon at foolsworkshop.com. I am a big fan of iFlash and was surprised to see you preferred Genius which has far fewer features. I would be interested in your experiences however. Did you try interval study in iFlash? I believe it has the best implementation of spaced repetition out there so far, though there are a few bugs to be squashed.
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