[Buy
Supermemo for Windows]
[Buy
Supermemo for Palm Pilot]
[What Is
Supermemo]
[History of Supermemo]
[Pros and Cons]
[My Experience]
[Tutorials]
What Is Supermemo?
Supermemo is evolving in several directions. First of all, it is a learning system. Second, it is a system for incremental reading. Third, it is an intelligent tasklist.
NEW! Check out the Supermemo tutorials at this site! In progress.
Supermemo is a Learning Tool
I ran into Supermemo completely by accident. I'd begun studying for the Oracle DBA exams, and wanted to use my Palm Pilot to help make review less painful. I wanted a program which would do all the work for me: make up tests, quiz me, score the tests, and tell me how I'm doing. But nothing I found quite fit the bill. Supermemo for the Palm Pilot was "second best" to the imaginary program I was looking for, but it turned out better than I could have hoped!
Supermemo isn't a ``self-scoring quiz'' program at all. Instead, Supermemo organizes a set of ``flash cards'' that you design (or download from Supermemo). Each day, Supermemo goes through your flash cards and designs a quiz for the day. You take the quiz much the way you use ordinary flash cards: Supermemo shows you a question, and you think the answer to yourself. Then you click ``Show Answer'' and Supermemo ``turns over'' the flash card. You score yourself on a scale of 1-6, where 1 means that you knew the answer without any hesitation, and 6 means you've never heard the answer before in your life.
Now here comes the powerful part! Supermemo notes how well you did on each flash card. Then Supermemo uses this information to estimate how soon you will probably forget each answer. Just before that time, Supermemo will quiz you again on that card. How perfect! That's just what I did with those 3x5 cards--but now the computer does all the annoying work.
With the 3x5 cards, I would put every little fact on its own card. Then I'd tote around a stack of a few hundred cards, and quiz myself. If I felt ``pretty sure'' that I knew a fact, I'd put the card aside. Hopefully, I'd remember to look through those ``put aside'' cards once in a while, though, in case I forgot... In other words, using index cards was simple enough in principle--but it was a lot of work, and I was extremely prone to making mistakes.
Supermemo implements the same system, except:
Supermemo can store thousands of cards on your Palm Pilot, or millions of cards on your PC! A Palm Pilot with 8MB of memory can store over 40,000 flashcards.
Supermemo won't ever forget to review the cards you ``know cold''. So you really will know them cold when it counts.
Supermemo knows how well you're doing with each individual card. So it will quiz you on some cards every day, if necessary--but if you know a card, you'll only see it once a week, once a month, or even once a year!
Supermemo for Windows will allow graphics, sound, or any multimedia content you want in a flash card. Listen to Morse code, identify countries or rivers from their picture, identify your boss's kids, Name that Tune--whatever you can imagine, you can learn!
Why does this page read like an advertisement? Because it is. I use Supermemo, and I'm crazy about it. If you need to learn things for work, hobbies, or whatever, then Supermemo can help. If you heard about it here, please buy it through this link, so I'll get a cut.
[Incremental Reading]
[Intelligent Tasklist]
History of Supermemo
Supermemo was written by Dr. Piotr Wozniak in Poznan, Poland. He wrote it to help with his own studies in Biology while still a student. Later he applied it to learning English, and that's been his biggest success: Supermemo is hugely popular in Poland for studying languages, especially English.
As Supermemo grew in popularity, so Dr. Wozniak became increasingly obsessed with computer-aided learning, and he completed a Master's degree in computer science. He has a fairly involved theory about why Supermemo works, and how it works, most of which is beyond me. I don't really care whether I understand it, or even whether I believe it: the basic idea is so obviously sound, and the experience has been so positive since I started actually using it.
