Study lists and skills

Spaced repetition

JARDS Mobile lets you practice the items that you have collected in study lists using spaced repetition. Spaced repetition means that you make frequent reviews of items in the beginning, but as the information gets consolidated, you review the items less and less often.

The application of spaced repetition used in JARDS Mobile is based on the so called "Leitner system": all items are sorted into a number of imaginary boxes. When you are familiar with an item, it is moved to a higher box, but when you aren't familiar with it, is moved back to box 0. Since well known items move gradually up the boxes, more familiar items will end up in higher boxes, which means that the higher the box, the less often you should review it. In JARDS Mobile, you can configure the interval for the six boxes by selecting "Configure..." in the "Settings" menu.

The six skills

JARDS Mobile keeps track of the following six skills for word and kanji items:

Kanji to reading
Word items: You are given the word written in kanji. Do you know how to pronounce it?
Kanji items: Do you know the common readings of the character that you see?

Kanji to meaning
Word items: You are given a word written in kanji. Do you know what it means?
Kanji items: Do you know the meaning of the character?

Reading to kanji
Word items: You are given the reading of the word. Do you know how to write it in kanji?
Kanji items: Do you know which character corresponds to this set of readings?

Reading to meaning
Word items: You are given the reading of the word. Do you know what it means?
Kanji items: Do you know the meaning of the character with these readings?

Meaning to kanji
Word items: You are given the meaning of the word in English. Do you know how to write it in kanji?
Kanji items: Do you know which character corresponds to this meaning?

Meaning to reading
Word items: You are given the word in English. Do you know how to say the word in Japanese?
Kanji: Given the meaning of a character, can you name its readings?

Hint: JARDS Mobile lets the different skills reside in different boxes. That means that each item can have skills in up to six different boxes. Example: n word that has a difficult kanji reading but is easy understand if you hear it in spoken lanugage could have skill "Reading to Meaning" in box 0, but skill "Reading to Meaning" in box 5.

Selecting the skills to train

You may not want to train all skills for all items. For instance, if you have a list of words that you've collected from a news broadcast and you want to be able to understand the spoken words next time you hear them, you may want to concentrate on the "Reading to meaning" skill for those items.

To do that, you create a list and select "List Settings" in menu (1). The List Settings dialog (2) will appear. Tick the skills you want to quiz for items in this list, and tap "Ok". All items that you add to this list will now only be trained for the selected skill. However, if you add an item to the list and want to train other skills for that items, you can override the list settings and change the skills to be trained for an individual item. In that case, you select the item you want to edit, and then you tap the button named "Settings" (3). You will see the Item Settings dialog:

First tap "Custom" and then tick the skills you want to train for this particular item. You can switch back to the list defaults at any time by tapping "List defaults".