What do you think of Supermemo?

[stef11]

I've been using Supermemo to learn foreign languages.

[MrPenguin]

I too use SuperMemo, though mostly because of nostalgia. When I originally started looking into study methods while attending university back in 2005, Anki was not yet a thing, and SuperMemo was what you got if you wanted to use spaced repetition software. Due to various circumstances, I stopped using it for years, and when I started studying languages again back in 2011, Anki was my software of choice. Still, I've given up on Anki (and spaced repetition) several times, each time after a couple of months of overuse and getting swamped with repetitions. The last time I used anki was in January-March.

Then, on a whim, after reading up on the algorithm used in Anki compared with the more recent SuperMemo versions, I decided to try SuperMemo again, and have been using it to learn Japanese characters since mid-June. For once, I haven't gone overboard with adding stuff to it, and it seems I've finally established a routine of at the very least doing my daily repetitions (which, even though I'm adding less stuff, seem to be fewer in number than what I expected to get based on my experience with Anki). The user interface is an ugly mess, but I learned how to use it back in 2005-2006, so there was no adjustment for me coming from Anki.

If anyone were to ask me which program to use, Anki or SuperMemo, I think I would recommend Anki, unless those theoretical 30-35% fewer repetitions, and SuperMemo's Incremental Reading feature are really important to them. Anki is much more user-friendly, aside from a single aspect: in SuperMemo, you can set how many percent of your material it's ok to forget at repetition time (the forgetting index), and SuperMemo will adjust accordingly without any further need to mess around on the user's side. In Anki, how much you forget is entirely hit or miss, depending on what kind of material you're learning, how you grade, the properties of your memory, and your algorithm settings; if you want to achieve a certain retention level, you'll have to do the math manually, and adjust the settings accordingly.

[Christopher]

I liked it until, in the course of backing up my deck one evening years ago, the program crashed and burned and I lost 7,000 cards. And they were absolutely unrecoverable. Apparently, from what I have since learned, the 2000 version (which is still available as freeware) was very buggy, but nobody ever told me.
Anyway, I never used Supermemo after that.

[elco2]

I just changed my mind about it. I currently think it's great. I am using Supermemo-17. In general I like it's features over Anki, but the thing that kept me from throwing the whole thing in the trash again was the Mercy function. I left my cards alone for over a year, and had over 2000 cards due. I rescheduled them all to something reasonable. It was a real boost to my Greek reading ability.

[Monty]

...but the thing that kept me from throwing the whole thing in the trash again was the Mercy function. I left my cards alone for over a year, and had over 2000 cards due. I rescheduled them all to something reasonable.

You can reschedule your cards with Anki as well, and now you can also postpone them using an add-on.

What's still missing from Anki is the ability to freeze cards until further notice, something that the JALUP (Japanese Level Up) app lets you do, but sadly JALUP is not a general-purpose open SRS tool.

[german2k01]

Supermemo is for those who have a degree in Computer Science and Anki is for everyone else