Vocabulary apps: a wish list

With respect to spaced repetition algorithms, if anyone is interested in using something other than SuperMemo's SM2 algorithm, I devised the following for my JLDrill program: http://jldrill.rubyforge.org/Strategy.html

It has a few advantages over SM2 from my perspective. Instead of trying to time reviews, it simply tries to order the vocabulary by likelihood of remembering it. You then drill the vocabulary until you show that you are getting somewhat over 90% chance of remembering the vocabulary. It then presents new vocabulary. You can also set a cutoff point where the ratio of actual elapsed time is over ideal review time is over a certain point. It can then "forget" these items, which handily helps people who have spotty review habits.

Unfortunately, JLDrill currently suffers badly from bitrot and doesn't really work very well any more. I will admit that it wasn't particularly well written in the first place ;-) However, I recently dusted it off and if you are enterprising, you can probably get it mostly working: https://github.com/mikekchar/JLDrill

In recent releases, I've concentrated on implementing games in my iOS language apps.

Spanish: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/h4-spanish-lite/id388918463?...

French: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/h4-french-lite/id687567532?m...

I'm looking for new game ideas for my next release. My feeling is that learning is so repetitive that making it entertaining is important. After you learn a language, you have to maintain it. You don't want to do spaced repetition for the rest of your life.

I made one over a weekend: vocowl.com (give it few secs to load) Source: https://github.com/pathikrit/vocowl

Several of these overlap with Wiktionary, which tries to list words, their pronunciation, their meaning (in both the source and users language) and I believe they semi automatically select example sentences from public domain classics.