Well, over a month has passed since I made this program. I did start using it for real-life, on-demand purposes (Spanish class), and so far it has held up very well. In fact, I don’t think I’d be surviving the class without it, as there are a lot of smart people I know who are doing poorly in the class so far. I suck miserably at learning Spanish words, and I hate the way the class is run, and I can’t stand the teacher, yet I’m at the top of the class. 
After running into some problems during my cram sessions (all mentioned in the next section), I added important features to the program, and a new version is now available. Click here.
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The first challenge we faced in the class was to memorize the capitals of 20 Spanish-speaking countries. Class sessions were, for me, a waste of time, because I don’t learn new words well at all by simply hearing them. So I went home and typed them into my study program. I soon found out that the pure random word selection is a huge flaw. I learned 19 countries and capitals extremely well, almost ready to quit, and suddenly one I had never encountered before in the program came up.
The next time around I had a weekend to learn 50 new vocab words. This led me to throw in a priority system for word/definition selection. It isn’t super-effective, but it does enough to cancel out the problem of some words never even appearing.
In a later cram session, I somehow learned to connect words with definitions faster than I learned the words themselves. In this case I could have cut my study time in half if there existed an option to have definition-to-word questions only. I didn’t have the time to add the extra options, because it was 5 in the morning of the quiz day, and I was falling asleep anyway. But I did add them later.
So there’s now a new and improved version, ready for the most difficult of my cram sessions, and hopefully yours, too. Once again, click here.
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What I like the most about my program is that it seems fairly mindless. That is, I can be falling asleep at five in the morning with a painful headache, listening to music, eating a cold bowl of crummy cereal, and my studying isn’t affected much. It takes some concentration at times, but for me it’s pretty automatic. In fact, I can almost look at a list of words and approximate how many total hours it will take to master them all.
It isn’t perfect, however. Some words I learn much faster than others, and then the program gets really boring as I have to constantly enter in old, easy words until finally a hard one appears. As I said, the priority system does enough to at least show every word at some point, but not enough to give exactly the right questions. I keep the list open as I study so I can strategically limit the program’s focus of words and keep an eye on which ones I still need to work on.
Because all the study program does is drill the word and definition into your brain and connect them, it might not help in all situations. For example, I once had a different definition in my program than what my book was using, and therefore I didn’t know one of the questions on the quiz. There was also a large fill-in-the-blank section with no word bank, requiring words from the list. I ended up stuck on one question for a good five minutes before I remembered which of the words I would use was actually on the list.
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Sorry for the wall of text, but that’s my experience so far with using the program for my Spanish class.
