Hi, everybody. I am an "advanced beginner" in Japanese, having covered around 500 of Heisig's Kanjis and presently studying at Lesson 26 of "Minna no Nihongo 2".

I am now looking for a flashcard program for my PDA (Dell Axim) to support my studies. My "ideal flashcard program" should have the following three features: 1) The program uses Leitner's principle of "Spaced Repetitions" which I find extremely helpful. 2) The flashcards should also PLAY the sound of the word which is studied on each flashcard. 3) And I also want Flashcards helping me in my Kanjis.

It looks like I will end up with TWO sets of flashcards: One for vocabulary and one for the Kanji. After my research I have found THREE different programs which would suit me:

1) Stackz (http://www.stackz.com). Pros: I can get readymade flashcards for my "Minna no Nihongo"-Lessons. Cons: No sounds are played!

2) Declan (http://www.declan-software.com/pocket_pc.../index.htm). Pros: The vocabulary flashcards play sounds! Cons: No vocabulary for the "Minna no Nihongo". And I am not sure if their Kanji flashcards show stroke animation like the KingKanji.

3) KingKanji (http://www.gakusoft.com).

Does anybody have any experience with these Flashcards?

I have also found this dictionary for the PDA which plays the sounds of the words: http://www.ectaco.co.uk/Talking-Dictiona...-PocketPC/
I guess if I go for the Stackz flashcards I could turn to this "talking" dictionary for the sounds. Does anybody have any experience with this dictionary?

Any comments and advice would be highly appreciated!!!

I've never used windows mobile, but I used kingkanji a long time ago for palm and I just want to say that if you're using Heisig you probably don't really need it or want it. I believe it may have some sort of scheduling system, but I couldn't get it to work well enough to be useful; you'd be better off just using a general purpose spaced repetition program, I think. (Of course it is nice to have somewhere to practice drawing the kanji, but you don't need anything interactive for that. Twinkle for the palm is nice in that there's an option for it to just provide you with a box to practice drawing your answer before you say whether you remembered or not).

Being able to practice on your PDA anywhere sounds great, but I haven't been able to get it to work very well either; it seems like everything is so inconvenient or unreliable compared to the PC version of anki that it's hardly worth the effort.

I have King Kanji, I don't use it for any of my main reviews as I let RevTK handle that, I find it useful for reviewing new Kanji that I've done that day or the day before when I'm on the bus, which would otherwise be dead time. The feedback on stroke order is really useful as well, you know immediately if you're doing it wrong so stops back habbits being ingrained.

I used KingKanji back when I had a Palm. In those days, my main priority was cutting through RTK quickly without forgetting too many things. I used it mainly to make sure Kanji I learned in the past couple of days are still in my short-term memory.

The main problem is it doesn't (or didn't? I haven't looked at it in over a year) keep track of the cards you failed, so you can't really depend on it as your only reviewing tool.

I had a lot of fun with KingKanji when it came to reviewing the Heisig lessons (RtK files were included in the install file) but I never intended to use KingKanji as an SRS system. I played around with Supermemo on the Palm for a little while, but I ditched it in favor of using JUST my desktop PC as an SRS machine.
Have you ever thought of using just paper flashcards while you're away from your computer, and using electronic flashcards when you are on your laptop or desktop?