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Studying with Flash-Cards in Ubuntu

For students like me, it may be a busy time for studying at the end of January. I was interesting in trying out some flash-cards for memorizing question and answer format material, but without using lots of small paper cards. It turns out there’s a great flash-card application in the Ubuntu repositories.

Mnemosyne does a lot more than traditional paper cards can. It decides which questions to show when using a zero to five grading system. How well you grade your answer determines if the question will be asked relentlessly or rarely.

Mnemosyne

Start by adding items, click the add button in the tool bar to open the Add Items dialog. Here you type the question and answer. Unicode is supported, so you can use characters from other languages without trouble. Select an initial grade to add the card.

Once there are flash-cards in the database, the main window will display an item to test you on. Once make your guess, click Show Answer, and then select a grade to advance to the next one.

Saving is done automatically to the default database when Mnemosyne is closed. Databases can be saved as Mnemosyne’s .mem files, XML, and text. Here’s a sample database of 20 Linux acronyms that you can open with Mnemosyne.

Mnemosyne is available in Ubuntu 7.10 in the package mnemosyne. You can also click Install Mnemosyne to install it in Ubuntu 7.10 with apt-url. Source code for some newer versions are available on Mnemosyne’s website.

Archived Comments

Eike

Hey thank you for this nice program and especially for that cool “link2installation” in your post. That program is great for learning, but in addition to that I am looking for a vocabulary trainer with a similar grade system. Would be cool if you “discover” something for us sometimes :)

Thx

elmox

I just wanted to thank you for the apt-url. I’d spend a long while with the manual download, so thank you so much for that link mate.

tdrusk

Great post. I’ve been trying to find one of these for GTK forever.

ralph

I prefer granule (http://granule.sourceforge.net) which uses Leitner’s flashcard system (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flashcard).

ralph2

@ralph

Good remark! I like it better too.

Granule is Gnome
Mnemosyne is KDE

If you use the add/remove Granule is in Accessories, Menmosyne in Education.

@author (Tom) you should update your blog.
Gnome > Ubuntu
KDE > Kubuntu

chino

Just wanted to say a huge THANK YOU! I am creating flashcards for the HSK which is the Chinese proficiency test. Happy to share (if possible) all the hard work on inputting data. Just send me an email.

Eric

Heimy

@ralph2: Mnemosyne uses Qt, which is the basis for KDE… but that doesn’t make it a KDE app.

devon

Try Genius Flashcards for Linux, works great in ubuntu. Easy to use: http://www.gflashcards.com/page/genius_flashcards_apps.

Lyle Lexier

I hate Parley. I was using Parley to review my French vocabulary, and all of a sudden the file went from 38.9 KB to 0 KB and now I can’t even access the file anymore. It is skeletish. I only have 0 words in there instead of 200 words. I still can’t figure out how the file deleted itself. It was a kvtml file.

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