Mnemosyne is da bomb. This is the closest thing humanity has ever had to sticking one of those Matrix cables into the back of your head and streaming info in on a broadband line. Sure, the GUI might not look quite that cyberpunk, but the functionality is all there.
The basic premise of Mnemosyne, according to its creators, is to combine a flashcard viewer with an algorithm that shows you exactly what you need to know at exactly the right time for it to get seared into your gray matter. True, the boilerplate about “spaced repetition” with its vague references to “memory research” and people with long European surnames sounds a little like pseudoscientific babble. Regardless, it seems to work, and damn well.
After viewing each card, Mnemosyne asks you to rate your recall on a scale of 0, “totally forgotten”, to 5, “remembered with ease”. If the card is a new one, it asks using you to rate how familiar it has become on the same scale. These ratings go into the magical black box of the algorithm, and cause the cards to pop up again after a certain period of time. A typical session might involve a good dose of cards you have learned recently but do not yet have entirely memorised, a sprinkling of older cards to keep them fresh in your mind, and five or so brand new cards which you will see several times during the session until you’re confident you have them for a few days. Learning ensues.
Mnemosyne has an interface to put a Spartan barracks to shame. Just below the surface, however, is a treasure trove of handy little features such as three-sided cards, easy categorisation, tweaks to the appearance of cards including a handy feature which blows up the size of foreign script, and more. Once you have used Mnemosyne for a while, you start to get the impression that the developers are heavy users of the program themselves: every time you think “gee, I wish there was a way to -”, you realise that a solution has already been implemented. If not, there’s a small family of plugins, and of course you can always write your own. Want to add a sound file for the pronunciation of some foreign vocab, or an image to identify? Easy. Import a tab separated or XML flashcards database from your old flashcards program? No problems. It also exports cards, which is handy for mobile card viewers like the iPhone’s iStudy.
The only real downside is that it takes a little while for your mind to ‘get’ working with Mnemosyne. If you’re dedicated to learning your content motivation should get over this hump easily. Otherwise, it is easy to see how somebody giving this app a 10-minute test run could dismiss it as a lightweight flash-card flasher and nothing more. It’s not.
Mnemosyne is downloadable for Linux, Windows and OSX. It’s also available in the Ubuntu universe repository.
