Mnemosyne is not only the Greek Goddess of Memory, but also a fantastic little computer program for anyone trying to learn anything.

You set your own questions and answers, flashcard stylee, and you don’t just get a ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ for your answer, but you make a judgement call for yourself on your success. A grade of zero means “I have absolutely no idea”, one means “I don’t know, but I might kick myself when I see the answer” all the way up to five, meaning “Easy peasy lemon squeezy”.

The program then uses a calculated repetition period for each question to aid the learning curve. If you mark a question with a zero, you may well have it repeated immediately, or in a few questions’ time. Anything above a two will go away for a bit - maybe a couple of days for a two, possibly weeks for a five.

The added bonus is that the session has a natural end - the questions run out, it doesn’t just test you on everything. You then have the option to ‘learn ahead of schedule’, which is tempting but does tend to lead to brain overheating.

So… just a nice little proggy you might like to play with. I’m tempted to make a datafile with the Japanese T-shirt tutorials I was doing, and to pick them up again… we’ll see…