[yermierc]

I can completely relate to that frustration. I came from an engineering background before I went to medical school and I struggled a lot with the different styles of learning (applied principles at MIT vs. knowledge acquisition in med school). The biggest mistake you can make is think that your ability to remember is just an innate ability instead of a skill that can be cultivated.

The problem with spaced repetition software is that "SR" is just one of many known cognitive principles to aid in learning and memory. The encoding process is just as, if not more important than, the review process. I highly encourage looking into interleaving vs blocking, overlearning, learning vs. performance, retrieval-induced forgetting, contextual variability, and the (pre)testing effect. Learning how to incorporate these into your existing study process could really help you out.

This is where great existing software (e.g. Anki) falls flat for many people. If you're interested in seeing an alternative approach you can check out my company's platform Memorang (https://www.memorangapp.com). We recently raised a $500K seed round and are working on some really interesting problems around learning and memory, including a new type of spaced repetition that deviates significantly from the deterministic algorithms like supermemo3/Anki. Probably even more interesting, in addition to building apps for students we're also implementing a platform for developers and education entrepreneurs to monetize their efforts.

Although we're still fairly new we finished second to duolingo at the international reimagine education awards last week. Check out Memorang (web/Android) and let us know what you think (or come join us as a dev --> [e-mail]).

[laichzeit0]

Wish it could import Supermemo knowledge (with history). Simply can't afford switching to a new tool at this point (7 year Supermemo user with thousands of knowledge items).

[summarite]

If i may ask: how do you feel supermemo aided you? How regularly/much do you use it? What items do you store and what card models have you come to prefer (cloze, q-a, ...?) How has this impacted your life?

I have seen some kind of supermemo import for anki, not sure if it's maintained. Possibly it was just a script someone created - sorry can't find it right now.

[laichzeit0]

I use it to memorize Latin (and some Greek) vocabulary. What I use mostly is Q-A. Typically it looks like this:

Q. lat. adj. black (shiny)

A. niger, -a, -um

And the other way:

Q. niger, -a, -um

A. black (shiny)

So when I enter the knowledge, I write in a .txt file the first form, and the script I run generates the second. (I read on Supermemo's website it's good to test the reverse case too, so by default I do this for all knowledge items). Over time I found it was useful to prefix vocabulary with the language (lat.) because you'll typically have the same words in another language (grk.) and if it's an adjective or adverb to append (adj./adv.) after the language prefix (I wanted a single database). For verbs I found it's sufficient to write the English part as the infinite to .. (e.g. Q. lat. to kill, A. neco (1). I will occasionally write the word with macrons in brackets after the word if it's weird, e.g.

Q. lat. adv. daily

A. cotidie (cotIdiE)

I wanted to separate the two because real Latin literature does not contain the long/short macros and I wanted to condition myself to that from the start.

I use cloze mainly for grammar.

I use Supermemo daily and it takes about 20-30 minutes to memorize what is currently ~6500 items. My daily workload is between 70-100 items and my recall is about 85%. I will admit that I'm extremely hard on myself and will only score a 5 if it's absolutely perfect.

Whatever I've looked at before of Supermemo -> Anki import did not get it right 100%. I don't want my repetition history or workload screwed around with. I also want the ability to go back to Supermemo if it doesn't work out. Unless I feel comfortable that I can switch between both systems seamlessly I'll probably never switch. I run my Supermemo on a Windows VirtualBox in Linux so it can stay that way forever.

I would probably never use Supermemo for a "live" language. It would be a waste of time, imho. For languages which are not really spoken like Attic Greek or Latin, it is indispensable.

My only real problem with Supermemo is that there is no way to access it over the Internet. The database lives in that Virtualbox Windows. It would be amazing if it had the ability to spawn a little webserver that you could do your drills from.

[ionforce]

> a new type of spaced repetition that deviates significantly from the deterministic algorithms

Could you go into more detail about this?