Cramberry

Cramberry is like a beautiful little statue of a young cupid with cute little wings and a bow. It is pleasant to look at but it can’t do anything. The website has a beautiful clean design but almost no functionality so far.

However, Cramberry developers would be quick to point out they are still in the early stages of getting the project off the ground. Cramberry has its own twitter feed, its own blog, and a still very basic but promising $4 iPhone application, Flash-Me that connects directly with Cramberry.

Cramberry has a rating system built in for publicly available sets, which is probably better than the favorites count of Flashcard Exchange, and it offers a simple way to share sets between friends or make them publicly available.

Cards can be added quickly and easily with the use of the keyboard alone (pressing return after filling the back of the card saves the card and presents a new blank card). More advanced users can make use of its supported metalanguage textile to add formatting and images to the cards. This is a nice feature, but really not necessary now that there are great libraries for creating rich text input within webpages. Why force the user to memorize a metalanguage when you can provide buttons directly on the page for things like “bold” and “italic” etc.? Adding such buttons does clutter the interface but this is a case where functionality boost outweighs the decrease of a clean look (one could also simply add a link to “show/hide advanced editing tools”).

The website is clearly in its infancy and still has very far to go though before it can really be worthy of a full review but I hope to see it address some of these issues in future:

-Cramberry supports only two fields, which is very disappointing for students of Asian languages.

-Cramberry has No Support for Interval Study of any kind. The home page claims that “Cramberry records your progress on each card, and shows you cards you’re having trouble with more often, letting you study more effectively, faster.” which suggests that there is some kind of spaced repetition at work but users are left at the mercy of a “black box” approach without any inkling of how this process works. I hope the developers will describe there system in greater detail and offer ways of viewing the progress of individual words. It might be worth looking into some of the most powerful interval study implementations out there, such as those used in Anki, SuperMemo, or VTrain or simpler but clearly described ones such as those found in Flaschard Exchange with a simple static TTF schedule (See terms page).

-Cramberry has No Data Portability, cards cannot be downloaded in any format.

-Cramberry has almost no options for flashcard study and I can’t find any information on keyboard shortcuts.

-Cramberry seems to be connecting to Google Analytics between every card. Whatever else it might be doing, moving between cards is way too slow. There is a nice color coding of the sides of the card.

-There is no cycle elimination. The cards just continue to flip indefinitely. Basically this means it is guilty of the insatiability flaw.

-There are no statistics whatsoever.

-The website is beautiful but overly minimalist. Eliminating distractions when doing flashcard study is important, as I suggested when criticizing Flashcard Exchange, but surely someone on the design team could spare 15 minutes to put something on their help page other than “Contact us with your questions by twitter or email.” You can search for sets and show “more sets” but you have no way of going back through earlier pages in the search results, know how many total sets were found, etc.

-Many links are not universally available. The help link is not visible on the home page, the home page (which is the only page with any explanation of the site) is completely inaccessible to users who are logged in, etc.

I look forward to seeing Cramberry grow, but for now, I would recommend users consider other online and offline alternatives until it develops a basic feature set.

See also:

-My flashcard application Basics and explanation of Terms
-My introduction to online flashcard websites.

UPDATE: Cramberry posted an entry on their blog about the review. It is promising to see them acknowledging some of the issues and announcing some upcoming features on the site. Among them are a commitment to incorporating full interval study features, data portability, and statistics. I hope they will also strongly consider adding support for three fields, which is useful for students of many languages, especially Chinese and Japanese. Again, as I mentioned in the review, it is still an early stage for them so I look forward to revisiting the site and reviewing them when they follow through on some of their development goals.

The insatiability flaw is exhibited by flashcard applications which provide no pause or “completion” during the course of interval study in such a way that recognizes that some cards are not currently in need of review. It is problematic because it provides users with no way to efficiently manage their time by endlessly prompting them to review cards which the student is not likely to be on the verge of forgetting. Obviously, they can and should be continually prompted if there are indeed words that are untested or which are due for review, but otherwise, the application shouldn’t drag out cards that need not be reviewed for weeks or months (Though they should provide a way for users truly eager to continue reviewing, or offer a comprehensive study on demand feature).

Students turn to flashcards because they believe their study is a useful and efficient form of study. Most of them recognize that, when it comes to vocabulary acquisition and maintenance for example, it is an inferior method when compared to the frequent and sustained production and practice of a language in an organic communication setting. However, given that we do not always find ourself in such a setting, or find the range of our communication more limited than that needed for reaching and preserving our desired level of proficiency, flashcard study is an imperfect but helpful alternative.

However, given that our time is a limited resource and we may be engaged in flashcard study of multiple languages or sets of knowledge units generally defined, flashcard applications which are “insatiable” in their appetite to prompt us to review words give us no indication of when we have completely reviewed all words we are on the verge of forgetting.

The best way for a developer to think about this when designing their application is to remember that while it is crucial that the developer avoid the more serious Cookie Monster Flaw they should also keep this principle in mind:

An interval study system nears perfection the further it approaches an environment which only prompts a student to review those units of knowledge they are on the verge of forgetting.

If there is some advanced algorithm included which takes into account the user’s truancy it may want to provide early prompting of words that are not quite yet on the verge, but only based on some statistically guided expectation of future truancy of the user.

The first problem I write about on that page, I have called the “Cookie Monster Flaw” and so far I found it in both Mental Case and the “burn wheels” of Mindburn.

In the memorable words of a failed Sesame Student, “Me not continually review cookies at increasingly spaced intervals, me eat the cookie.” This flaw is, of course, exhibited by any flashcard software which offers no interval study but it is included here because it is also a problem with some approaches of applications which actually do support interval study: If an interval study system offers a finite number of interval stages, at which point the interval study for a given unit of information is said to be completed, it is guilty of the Cookie Monster Flaw.

The idea for this comes from the practice, prevalent among some students in places such as China, Korea and Japan, of learning vocabulary directly from a dictionary. In an ritual act of symbolism, once all the words, or chosen words, from a given page of a dictionary have been “memorized” the page is ripped out of the dictionary and consumed. My experience, admittedly not backed by evidence from a full empirical study, suggests that thus physically digesting the ink and highlighter fluid of memorized words does not in fact have much of an impact on long-term retention of vocabulary.

Developers should keep this principle in mind:

Even native speakers forget their own languages during extended periods of disuse; no interval study system should be designed in such a way that implies the complete and final memorization of any unit of information.

I know many students of Chinese that use Wenlin to get their definitions and input vocabulary into flashcard software. Most recently I saw someone do this in a coffee shop here in Taipei, and it brought back a lot of memories of me doing the same in Beijing almost a decade ago.

Wenlin doesn’t make it easy for you, however, to get the word entries into a format that can be easily imported into flaschard applications. There is no “export” feature, presumably because the developer doesn’t like the idea of large parts of the Wenlin dictionary getting out of the software and into a separate database. However, the lack of such a feature means that students have to copy and paste words from Wenlin and add their own tabs. In my case, I also like to delete the alternate hanzi to keep my flashcards more clean.

Although a more experience programmer with good regular expressions skills could easily take this further, I am releasing the results of an evening spent trying to learn how to program in the programming language Ruby:

Wenlin Conversion Script

Here is a screencast explaining how to use the script:

Wenlin Conversion Script Screencast

This script takes a text file with a list of Wenlin dictionary entries (Saved in TextEdit, not in Wenlin) and puts tabs between the hanzi and the pinyin and between the pinyin and the definition. It saves the converted file which can then be easily imported into your favorite flashcard program.

It is made up of two scripts: the convert.app applescript application which you is what you use to run the script and the convert.rb ruby script which does the actual conversion. You can customize three options in the convert.rb script. Just open it up and set the three option variables at the top to true or false according to your preference for that option. There is a description of what each option does in the ruby file but basically they control whether the alternate traditional/simplified hanzi are removed, whether the “|” character is changed to “Example: ” and the “~” in examples replaced by the pinyin of the word.

I haven’t tested this too extensively so if you see it do strange things with the wenlin vocab items let me know and I’ll tweak the script in the future.

UPDATES:

-I just noticed in the screencast that it split the word “fandong fenzi” and put “fenzi” into the definition – I need to update the regular expression so that it looks for the part of speech rather than a space to separate the pinyin from the definition. I didn’t realize that Wenlin sometimes puts spaces into its pinyin words. I’ll release this soon.

-I just updated a 1.1 version. See the enclosed Read Me file for things I have fixed and changed in this new version of the script.