Learning Algorithm

SPB Flash Cards
Learn by Heart!

SPB Flash Cards helps you to increase your vocabulary in the language you study

Let's start with what SPB Flash Cards is and what it is not.

IS NOT:

SPB Flash Cards has no claim to be the sole mean of learning a language, although provides great assistance in that.
SPB Flash Cards and flash cards in general are not the best way for learning
non-picturable words. There are many other different methods (reading in a context, dialogs, etc) for learning such words.

IS:

SPB Flash Cards provides a great way to learn names for objects around us. You could skip the stage of translating a word into your mother tongue first, memorizing a direct match of a subject and a foreign word instead.
All the words in SPB Flash Cards are dubbed by native speakers of respective languages. It will help you to get right pronunciation of all the words you learn.

How SPB Flash Cards Works

Visual Approach

When we learn a language it is crucial to skip the stage of translating a word into mother tongue first, memorizing a direct match of a subject and a foreign word instead. A child does not translate anything but learns to speak by experiencing the world around. When you were a child your parents just pointed at a table and said "table". SPB Flash Cards allows you to learn a language in the same way.

We believe that good photo-realistic pictures are important to make direct associations between objects and how they are called in the language you study.

Spacing Effect

In psychology, the spacing effect refers to the fact that humans and animals more easily remember or learn items in a list when they are studied a few times over a long period of time ("spaced presentation"), rather than studied repeatedly in a short period time ("massed presentation"). Multiple theories have been proposed to explain the spacing effect. Some now believe that an appropriate account should be multifactorial, and at present, different mechanisms are invoked to account for the spacing effect in free recall and in explicit cued-memory tasks. Greene (1989) proposed a two-factor account of the spacing effect, combining deficient processing and study-phase retrieval accounts. Spacing effects in free recall are accounted for by the study-phase retrieval account. Under the assumption that free recall is sensitive to contextual associations, spaced items are advantaged by additional encoding of contextual information relative to massed items. Thus, the second occurrence of an item in a list reminds the observer of the previous occurrence of the same item and of the contextual features surrounding that item. When items are presented in a spaced manner, different contextual information is encoded with each presentation, whereas for massed items, the difference in context is relatively small. This leads to more retrieval cues being encoded with spaced relative to massed items, leading to improved recall.

To help you to the words SPB Flash Cards softly forces you to make delays between repeating a certain word. You can repeat a word several times a day but only the first time will count in the statistics.

SPB Flash Card Algorithm

The first time you open a new word the program shows you a picture and asks if you know this word. When you rotate the card you see how this object is called in the language you study. If you say you knew the word the program will consider this word as a word that was known before and will not ask it again.

SPB Flash Cards will help you to learn the words you did not know before. There are five levels for each word. On each level there is a different task:

On the first level you see a picture and should answer for yourself how it is called
On the second level the program shows you a picture and gives you four different word variants and you need to choose the right one
On the third level SPB Flash Cards shows you a word and you should answer for yourself what it means
On the forth level you need to choose the right picture for the given word among four options
On the fifth level the program plays you a sound and you should select the right picture among the four given

To follow the Spacing Effect recommendations the program will not allow you going to the next level the same day you got the previous level for a certain word.