Hard to memorize vocabulary, formulae, facts

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Several years ago, when I was learning to read and write in Japanese, I came across a really excellent book called Remembering the Kanji

Vol. 1: A Complete Course on How Not to Forget the Meaning and Writing of Japanese Characters by James W. Heisig (Paperback - May 2007)

Apart from the really innovative way that the book teaches a couple of thousand Chinese characters; I was greatly impressed with a very simply, efficient and highly effective memorizing technique that was introduced...

This was called the "learning box"

Basically, the learning box is just a highly efficient way of spending your time going through traditional flash cards.

Flash cards have been used by students around the world for ages now. (You know... bits of card or whatever with, say, a foreign language word on one side and its translation on the other. You look at one side of the card and see if you know the answer, before turning it over to confirm whether you were right or wrong. Mathematical formulas, historical facts and figures. The possibilities are endless.) But just having a stack of the things in your pocket or top drawer and going through the whole lot from time-to-time is not the most efficient way of utilizing your precious study hours. So what "Remembering the Kanji" taught was a learning box...

The traditional learning box is a physical box with about five separate compartments. You can make your learning box as elaborate as you want, or just knock one up from any old but suitably-sized box. All your new flash cards go into the first compartment. When you test yourself on a card; if you get it right, it moves into the next compartment. Each successive compartment is bigger than the one before it and the last one, (number five, if your are using a five compartment system,) needs to be about the same size as compartments one to four put together.

No matter what compartment a flash card has reached, if you get the answer wrong when you test yourself on the card it MUST go right back to box one. This way, stuff that you know and can retain OK will move steadily through the system. But anything that you are a bit "shaky on" will keep coming back to the start until you have finally got it firmly implanted into your brain!

So you automatically spend more time on what you need to review - and less on what you already know.

Simple but very efficient. I'd say so!

Anyway, since I am a seaman and I generally have to board a plane every time I go to work, carrying boxes of cards around with me just adds to my already overloaded baggage. I had often thought about downloading an electronic version of the learning box to the laptop computer that I always bring with me on board ship...

Now... This took a fair bit of research on Google...

So, to save a bit of time for anyone else who might be interested in downloading digital (electronic) learning box software to their computer, here is what I found:

You can download one type of electronic learning box software, called MemoAccelerator at:

http://www.plainsystem.com/

The download is free. You get a couple weeks-or-so to play around and explore the software, then if you want to keep using it, you have to pay about US$25 or something.

When I first installed the software on my laptop, my immediate impression was; "What the Hell is this... I am glad I didn't send them any money!!"

I was very close to just deleting the whole thing - but I persevered with it and after quite some time reading the help manual and generally playing around with the different settings and things; I finally did manage to get my head around how to use and customize MemoAccelerator.

Suffice it to say that now I have done my homework, I am extremely impressed with the software and its highly customizable possibilities.

This is, without a doubt, a very powerful learning tool and I will be more than happy in paying-up my $25 dollars for a full license to continue using the software!

If anyone needs a bit of guidance on how to set-up or use MemoAccelerator, I'll be happy to oblige. Just post a reply to this topic - or, if you are a member of the artfreaks.com Forums, you can send me a PM