SuperMemo

This page is now archived and no longer updated. I recommend Mnemosyne for all of your spaced repetition needs.

SuperMemo is software that is designed to help you memorize for the long term-- over periods of years. If your goal is fluency in Japanese, this can be very useful.

However, SuperMemo is not without its own set of problems, and for this reason I now recommend Mnemosyne for studying Japanese.

However, since SuperMemo is right for some people, I am leaving this guide up on the site. I used SuperMemo extensively for eight months, and I will still make minor updates to the guide as necessary, so if you have any comments or concerns, please don't hesitate to send me feedback or to comment directly on the pages.

How SuperMemo Works

First, you enter what you want to learn in Q&A format. You can enter as much information as you want.

Then, once you have entered enough data, SuperMemo will start quizzing you every day on what you have learned. It will show you a question, then you press enter to see the answer. Then you grade yourself on a scale from 0-5, with 5 being perfect recognition and 0 being complete memory blank.

Here is the official intro to SuperMemo.

Over time, SuperMemo tracks your progress on each individual question, and shows you questions you miss more often far more frequently than those you rarely miss. This is the killer feature-- you can do flashcards yourself, but once you have 10,000 flashcards, there's no efficient way to review them. This is where SuperMemo excels, and it does this so brilliantly that despite the many flaws noted above, I find it indispensable in my study of Japanese.