Hacker News Reader

Comment by throwaway9d0291 | Hacker News Reader

Some Anki-like alternatives that people may like and not have seen (mostly focused on learning languages):

- Memrise - https://www.memrise.com/ - Has a very extensive selection of decks for language learning

- Supermemo - https://www.supermemo.com/en - Has a (disputed) claim that its algorithm beats Anki, various pre-made decks

- Drops - https://languagedrops.com/ - Mobile-only, has a higher reliance on pictures and audio over written translations.

View on HN

There is also SuperMemo 18 (https://super-memo.com/supermemo18.html) which is from the same people as supermemo.com except it's a desktop app with way more features but also a much higher learning curve.

If you use SM and you use anki both for a significant amount of time it's not hard to see that SM leaves you with way less reps. Anki is based on the very first version of the SuperMemo algorithm (from ~1990 or so which was the first SRS algorithm ever) known as SM2. Current version of SM uses SM18.

Too bad SM is Windows-only and desktop-only. The beauty of Anki is that you can review anywhere.

On linux you can use SM via vmware/wine and on os x it's quite usable with parallels. If you're using SRS just for language learning then being able to use on mobile can be helpful but I think for those cases supermemo.com can be a decent alternative. More generally, I think the platform specificness of SuperMemo is more than made up for with its incremental reading functionality (alongside better scheduling algorithm)

> On linux you can use SM via vmware/wine

To add to this, there's a set of Winetricks recipes for running SM on Linux.[0] (Disclaimer: I haven't tried them, though I've been planning to, for a while.)

[0] https://github.com/alessivs/supermemo-wine

You might also try my website (and soon to be app) Seedlang: http://www.seedlang.com. It is a site for learning German, and later this year Spanish, French, and English. It uses video flashcards to create different learning experiences, and ties them all together with a Anki-like review deck where any word or sentence encountered on the site can be saved.

Isn't Anki based on Supermemo?

yep, it's based off the first supermemo algorithm, SM2

Reply on news.ycombinator.com