Thanks for the info everybody, especially wrightak & krusher. My goal was to switch flashcards over to a handheld before my trip to Japan, which is at the end of the month (anybody in Fukuoka want to meet?). Due to time, I've decided to back off a little and make a more informed decision. Looks like my laptop is going to Japan.
I'm using supermemo right now, which gives excellent results. But the UI is terrible, and I had so much trouble getting around encoding issues at first, I'm just afraid when I start learning other languages I'll have to go through hell again. It took me about 30 hours to figure out how to use it and get all my data properly loaded and sorted, etc. Because I like to travel a lot, and because I hate spending hours with desktops and laptops, getting a handheld seems like the smart thing to do. As long as all I'm doing is reps (I plan to author on my laptop), I could just stretch out in an easy chair and go for it. I heard about twinkle, and thought "wow, this is the perfect opportunity to break away from supermemo". I heard it's similar to supermemo but with no encoding problems and a simple UI.
Your excellent posts got me to do some research. I found out that twinkle doesn't have font support for some of the languages I want to study (but may have it in the future). I've also heard that supermemo for pocket pc is much more user friendly than desktop. I know a guy who's using it to study 20 languages right now. He's a programmer, so maybe he's written a lot of code to handle foreign fonts. So now I'm leaning towards a pocket pc and supermemo. I'll check out the link of reviews wrightak posted.
I think I'll go with an English OS, because I want to try to use the same machine for many languages. I wouldn't have considered character recognition to be a priority, but the whole dictionary setup wrightak mentioned sounds sweet. I don't have any plans to use this as a phone, but thanks for the really interesting info, technology is amazing. Also, I don't mind paying more for a better machine.
Given my new parameters, any suggestions or info will be much appreciated. Thanks again.
I'm using supermemo right now, which gives excellent results. But the UI is terrible, and I had so much trouble getting around encoding issues at first, I'm just afraid when I start learning other languages I'll have to go through hell again. It took me about 30 hours to figure out how to use it and get all my data properly loaded and sorted, etc. Because I like to travel a lot, and because I hate spending hours with desktops and laptops, getting a handheld seems like the smart thing to do. As long as all I'm doing is reps (I plan to author on my laptop), I could just stretch out in an easy chair and go for it. I heard about twinkle, and thought "wow, this is the perfect opportunity to break away from supermemo". I heard it's similar to supermemo but with no encoding problems and a simple UI.
Your excellent posts got me to do some research. I found out that twinkle doesn't have font support for some of the languages I want to study (but may have it in the future). I've also heard that supermemo for pocket pc is much more user friendly than desktop. I know a guy who's using it to study 20 languages right now. He's a programmer, so maybe he's written a lot of code to handle foreign fonts. So now I'm leaning towards a pocket pc and supermemo. I'll check out the link of reviews wrightak posted.
I think I'll go with an English OS, because I want to try to use the same machine for many languages. I wouldn't have considered character recognition to be a priority, but the whole dictionary setup wrightak mentioned sounds sweet. I don't have any plans to use this as a phone, but thanks for the really interesting info, technology is amazing. Also, I don't mind paying more for a better machine.
Given my new parameters, any suggestions or info will be much appreciated. Thanks again.
Edited: 2006-08-18, 10:44 am