What is SuperMemo?

SuperMemo is software written by Polish scientist Piotr Wozniak. It basically is designed to help you remember information. In this case, the information is Kanji. The program looks and feels like flash card software, but its uniqueness is that it seeks for the best intervals between the repetitions. In other words, the time you invest to the study is used in the most efficent way. Naturally there are no miracles promised - everyone has seen silly texts such as "Master German in 3 months", or "English without study", or "Speak Japanese fluently is 23 and a half minutes..." etc. If you are looking for effortless easy study method, then stop reading here (and stop studying Japanese). However if you are strongly motivated to study, and are looking for a more effective way of remembering your Kanji, then SuperMemo can probably help you.

What can I study using SuperMemo?

Almost any data that can be divided into a "question - answer" pair. SuperMemo is extremely useful especially for studying languages. If you have been studying Japanese, then you already know how time consuming memorizing kanji characters can be. We think this is where SuperMemo can help. Using Yamasa databases, we exported from our online kanji dictionary almost 2000 basic kanji characters, based on Joyo Kanji list (Japanese Ministry of Education) and created SuperMemo databases. Every "question - answer pair" contains: the kanji character, the radical, ON reading, KUN reading, the main meaning of this character, the stroke count, the radical number and Joyo grade. We have two kind of databases. The first shows you the kanji character and you study by answering the character with it's reading. The second database shows you the readings and main meaning and you study by writing this character. So by using both databases, supermemo helps you drill your reading and writing skills. You can als add new information/data and modify the databases as per your preferences. It is not a closed system. To be precise, we have 12 databases, since there are 2 databases for each of English, German, Spanish, Traditional Chinese, Korean and Czech.

We are still working on refining the package, so please be patient. If you want to ask more, or have suggestions or feedback, please write to: "supermemo AT yamasa DOT org".

Do you want to know more?

If so, then visit SuperMemo original pages here.

Download sample database here:

Kanji character database for SuperMemo (reading training - english version) (right click on the link and Save as)

Note that this is only a sample database. The number of kanji characters is very limited.

The database is in ZIP format, which means that needs to be unpacked before you can use it.

Some screenshots (click on the picture for it`s bigger version):

Kanji database for testing reading (English version)

Kanji database for testing reading (English version) - tree view

Kanji database for testing writing (German version)

Kanji database for testing reading (Spanish version)