Hi there, i would like to know is there any method to transfer words from ling vocabulary to supermemo? I’m talking about easier way than copy and paste each word. I heard that it is possible to export cases from ling to supermemo, if anybody knows how to do it, tell me, please.
Use the LingQ vocab export, it’s a CSV file. See vocab page on the right, bottom.
Ok, i downloaded a csv file. It opens on excel, and then what?
Maybe Supermemo has some import function, and if so, hopefully csv is one of the supported formats.
Supermemo has an import function accessible from the File menu. One format that works for me is questions and answers on two separate lines. Like this:
Q: Hus
A: Norwegian word for House
Q: Ulv
A: A large furry creature that is the ancestor of a dog
I have been using Supermemo for about 8 years and like it. But, it’s interface is byzantine.
I use it primarily in this way in my study of Norwegian:
- I select a newspaper article in Norwegian from an online newspaper and copy it to Supermemo as the top panel.
- I have Google translate the text and copy it to the bottom panel of Supermemo as an answer.
- I use Cloze selection to select a phrases from the text that I attempt to translate.
I also import question and answers pairs that I have created from online dictionaries
Why have I never heard of Supememo before? Please explain to us what you use it for and how good it is!
Supermemo (Anki, Memorylifter etc.) is a flashcard program based on the “spaced repetition system” idea, i.e. the words that you know “better” than others don’t show up up as often as other words. If you want to make sure that you review you vocabulary now and then, a pure SRS program is the way to go. The flashcard tool here at LingQ is too basic (words reach level 4 too quickly, and then never show up again unless you “degrade” them).
I would use flash cards and now our cloze test as a break from reading and listening, a sort of exercize for the brain. When I do, I like to refer to the examples that our system provides. I spend less than 5% of my time on this kind of activity, however. But this is all personal.
In my experience, any word that you need an SRS system to remember is probably not that important in the first place. I prefer to focus on the words that reappear in the texts that I am reading, not only the relatively infrequent ones that I have saved before, and are highlighted in yellow, but even the more common ones, that I have not yet learned to use.
I spend most of my time on content, listening and reading. Very few of the many tens of thousands of words that I have saved ever move to status 4, or “known”. I kind of like to see them again, even the familiar ones, highlighted in yellow. I occasionally go into my Vocab section and cull a few hundred of them using the batch function to change status.
But as I say, this is all personal.
My investment in understanding Supermemo was huge. If I had know in the start how long it would take to get useful results, I would not have started. I use now but cannot recommend it.
LingQ has a stable, easy to use interface. You cannot really appreciate how important that is until you use a difficult application like Supermemo
The key to flashcards, I think, is having a really good deck. Just direct word for word translation decks are not very helpful.
But if you have a sentence on one side, and the definition of a keyword in the sentence on the other - that can be helpful. The definition can even be in the target language if you can find a dictionary with easy explanations (there are plenty for English, for example).
Flashcard programs also allow audio and images, so you can see an image and try to think of the word rather than translate a word. Or you can listen to audio recordings of sentences featuring words you are trying to learn.
But the amount of time required to make a good deck is significant. I think that in the future we’ll be able to purchase pre-made decks (and some good free ones are already available), and that will make things easier. But for now, people will have to decide how much time they want to invest in making their deck if they can’t find a good pre-made deck.
And of course some people advocate making your own deck because the process of making the deck will also help you learn the langauge. I used to make my own deck, but I found it was taking too much of my time, so I just added some pre-made material. I don’t think I’m really losing out by not making my own deck (I hope, anyway).
The act of making the deck is very important in my opinion. It takes a long time and one learns a lot in the doing