#1 Create randomized, Leitner-like, portable vocabulary trainer

[Rolf]

Hi,

as I made publicly known in
http://groups.google.de/group/sci.lang.japan/browse_thread/thread/2f2226d0800b7948/a552ea496ea1a0b3?lnk=st&q=leggewie+zaurus+vocabulary+OR+random&rnum=1#a552ea496ea1a0b3
I have long been dreaming of a simple, yet powerful
vocabulary trainer that I can use one the Desktop and
on the go with my PDA.

Here are the features I'd be looking for.

- portable (at least Win9x/2k/XP, Linux, Zaurus PDA)
- at least "three sides" to each card (Kanji,
reading, meaning)
- capable of displaying Japanese character
- random, yet biased order of presenting cards

With random, biased order of presentation I mean that
as I correctly learn a card the probability that it
will be displayed again decreases fairly rapidly. IOW,
the next card should always be random but a new card
ought to (for example) be double as likely to be
presented as one I
learned correctly once which ought to be double as
likely to come up as a card I learned correctly twice
and so on. This feature is very important for me.

Looking for comments from you guys. Any important
feature missing? What would be the best way to realize
this? Anybody interested in having a stab at it?

Best

Rolf

[Rolf]

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Today I stumbled across http://granule.sf.net which might
fit the bill or might at least be close to it. Furthermore,
Wikipedia lists some interesting entries on several pages
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flashcard,
http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lernkartei-Software and
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spaced_repetition

[Rolf]

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I am leaning towards http://mnemosyne-proj.sourceforge.net/.
The interface is not as polished as the one for granule,
but my feeling is, it has more potential, not least because
it is written in Python which I hope to master soon. C++ on
the other hand, I will probably never learn which would
leave me at the mercy of others.

[Rolf]

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Since Johnny joined our team today and made his software
public, we have something to work on. REJOICE!

Assigning to Johhny.

[Nobody/Anonymous]

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you should consider the KDE EDU Projects' "KVocTrain". It is part of the
standard KDE desktop in all current Linux distributions. It can handle
simoultaneous languages (I've used 7 at a time), it it also has a program
learning japanese called "Kiten". http://edu.kde.org

[Rolf]

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thank you for suggesting Kiten.

Unfortunately, Kiten is quite exactly the opposite of what we are looking for. KDE is, well, for KDE people only. Being so resource-hungry, you would also not get it to run on a PDA or a phone. That is one of the main features we are looking for, portability, learning while being in a train and the like.

We do have two projects in the pipeline. The code is there and they already run on some devices. They are Jards Mobile and granule. Release is coming up slowly but steadily.