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Work with MemAid regularly
(The best would be to use it every day, at least for few minutes).
It's far better to spend every day one minute learning with MemAid, than spending 10 minutes every 7 days.
The worst is longer breaks from MemAid - not doing any repetitions at all for a longer time.
They ruin the learning process (up to few days without MemAid are ok though).
Don't be negligent during repetitions
Even if you remember a fact well, please don't be negligent during its repetitions.
Spend at least a few seconds thinking about it (the best would be to use a association using imagination here - some mnemonics) before going to the next item.
Many people, especially when they don't have time, tend to go quickly through repetitions - without a lot of thinking about
the repetition. This seriously has a bad effect!
Don't give up
After some time (e.g. a month), you may have the feeling that you don't learn much with MemAid.
Even worse, you may have the feeling that it's extremally hard to learn anything with MemAid
- you have so many repetitions and you have serious problems with recollecting answers...
Well, remember that MemAid doesn't repeat items you do remember well, but only these hard to remember that your are close to forgetting!).
So, with MemAid, you repeat only these difficult items (and often have a feeling that you forget so fast..).
But keep in mind that in your learning process are many elements that you do remember well - they are just not shown to you
because you remember them well.
Keep question and answers as short and simple as possible.
Every time you repeat a item (and you will have many repetitions)
you will have to read a question and an answer.
Therefore, the shorter the question and answer, the less time you waste on the item.
(Note that you should spend some time on every item,
but ideally, spend a lot of time thinking about the answer, that reinforces your memory of this item.
Exec tags
While some MemAid front-ends (e.g. console version) don't offer things like images, sounds,
there is a way of using them indirectly.
By putting <exec>a_command </exec> in a question/answer you will make run a_command
on the question/answer).
Thus you can use images:
<exec>gqview /a/path/to/an_image.png</exec>
(if you have installed gqview),
or movies:
<exec>mplayer /a/path/to/a_movie.mpg</exec>
and many other things.
PLEASE also read external document on SuperMemo's website: www.supermemo.com/articles/20rules.htm ("Twenty rules of formulating knowledge")
The console version can be run with parameters (e.g. if your terminal has width of 120, "ma -t 120" will make use of your full terminal width). Run "ma -help" to see all possibilities.
... more to come ...
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