Ebbinghaus - 1.5

I downloaded and opened Ebbinghaus in hope that I would be able to construct my own card set for language studies in non-western languages. Languages that don't use the Roman alphabet. Languages that are best represented with jpegs or pdfs. I've been using Macs for 20 years, and I speak German well enough to send an inquiry in German to the developer, asking how the heck the package works. It is not, I repeat NOT intuitive in the least. It is not progressive. It is not clear at the outset what one must do first to accomplish anything other than examine lists of german-english political terminology. There is no Help file or folder, there is no tech or customer support, and there is no User Guide of any kind. I realize this is shareware, payment optional, but if I can't use it...well, I don't need it. I suppose this review will generate all the usual crap from all the usual flamers, and maybe in that crap there will be a nugget of information that will show me how to use the package. Good. IF that happens, I will have accomplished something for all of us out here who can't see this emperor's clothes.

This looks like a very promising complement to Genius 1.6 for using images as the questions or answers, or using sentences that are too long to write as answers, in cases when recognition is more important than word-for-word or letter-for-letter reproduction. The interface is very similar to Genius 1.6, so it will be familiar to those users.

Unfortunately, though, I can't seem to convert my tab-delimited Hebrew–English dictionary into an XML file or a “;” CVS. A tab is the one thing that I can’t seem to enter in the separator dialogue box in Preferences. By the way, “separator” was misspelled as “seperator” in that box.

I did manage to import a very sporadic list due to the existence of semicolons in my definitions, and although it was unusable, I was really impressed that the Hebrew was displayed in the right direction with the vowels positioned properly, indicating that this is a fully Unicode-compatible application, unlike many wordprocessors for which such a function should be mandatory.

I guess I need to find a way to create an XML file, and then I can upload tons of Hebrew, Japanese, and Chinese vocabulary lists that I've compiled over the years. Until then, I'll just continue using Genius, as forcing a person to type the answer really distinguishes true learning from recognition or vague recollection of memorized text. I still need Ebbinghaus for drilling myself on long detailed definitions.