A fellow student in a language course told me about a very nice piece of software: jMemorize. It is written in Java and published under the GPL.

jMemorize uses the Leitner flashcard system , which is the best system I've heard of so far. You have a box divided into several sections and cards with questions on one side and answers on the other side. The cards in the first section are to be dealt with today, if you know the answer, the card is put into the next section and will not be repeated until the next day. Every time you know the answer, the time until the card is repeated again increases. If you don't know the answer, the card gets back into the first section where it will be repeated every day.

There are two versions on the homepage: one that can be installed under Windows and a .jar-file. The latter one does not need to be installed and can be used on any operating system for which Java is available.

jMemorize-screenshot source: jmemorize.org

Some features of jMemorize:

• Each card has an internal "flag", when it shall be repeated next time. You don't need to keep track of that yourself.
• You can determine, how much time you want to spend for learning beforehand. If you don't want to learn for more than, say 20 minutes, you can tell the program before you start.
• Instead of that, you can also determine, how many cards you want to repeat in that session.
• You can search either the front- back- or both sides of the currently loaded file. This helps, if you're unsure whether you already entered a certain word or if you want to use the software as a dictionary.
• Importing CSV-files is possible. Sometimes it can be more convenient to make your vocabulary lists with OpenOffice Calc or MS-Excel, where you can use spellcheckers.
• The program supports UTF-8, which means that you can learn a lot of languages with alphabets other than the English one. Some more information on that is provided at the project homepage.
• The jMemorize wiki provides some links to downloadable lessons.
• You can change the language of the user interface without installing additional files.
• At the moment jMemorize is not available for PDAs.

This software is really worth looking at. With such software you can also learn maths and other stuff, as long as you are creative enough to encode the information needed in text form.

Once again the link to the homepage: http://jmemorize.org/