The Stackz System
Stackz is a flashcard organizer program running on Windows, Pocket PC and Palm OS. The focus of Stackz lies in visualizing the student's knowledge state.
| The Stackz concept - Refresh Date | The Stackz Concept - Repeat Advisor |
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The Stackz visualization system extends the well known "box" system by by representing the nature of the card with the color brightness.
| Detecting and eliminating one's weak spots is immediate! | |
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The Stackz system helps you to optimize your learning efficiency, regardless whether you must keep up to the pace of an intensive course with 30 new words per day (intensive learning), or whether you spend 20 minutes per week on your 10'000 words collection (proficiency retention). |
The Software Representation
A Stackz document contains several lessons, each of which has a set of flashcards that are distributed in the five promotion levels. The color of each card shows its test state.
In contrast to conventional decks of paper cards, Stackz allows to select
any combination of stacks and perform the actions
with all selected cards:
Learn -
become familiar with the words in the selected stacks.
Test -
do a refresh check of the words in the selected stacks.
Japanese Learning Session (click to enlarge)
| You never lose the control over your words! | |
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The Stackz system does not take decisions for you, nor are actions performed automatically. It rather makes the current situation transparent and lets you to decide what you want to do about it. |
Screencast: The Stackz Color System
This demo shows how the color system is working in combination with the Test Dialog and the "RefreshDate" Color Mode.
Press the play button to watch the screencast!
Stackz makes a big difference between testing and learning. In the above sequence, only testing is shown. This scenario is realistic when learning takes place every day in class and Stackz is only used for checking one's current proficiency state in the evening.
Also note that there are other Color Mode than RefreshDate which is used here. Our Color Mode RepeatAdvisor for example goes one step further by highlighting the words that must be refreshed, with an increasing repetition interval for better mastered words (spaced repetition).
The Features at a glance |
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Flashcard organizerwith simulation of the natural knowledge loss by changing the color of words that should be refreshed. |
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The Dictionary Edition is optimized for learning Japanese or Chinese by offering a seamlessly integrated Japanese/Chinese character lookup system. |
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A Standard Edition is available for learning any other language. |
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Separate tools for learning new words and refreshing mastered ones. |
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Pocket PC version available, using the same wordlists. |
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Print the words as list or paper flashcards for offline learning. |
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List Import Wizard for importing any existing wordlist. |
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Automated wordlist creation by extracting words from Japanese or Chinese webpages or other texts (Stackz Dictionary Edition only). |
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Large wordlist archive with off the shelf wordlists for your need. |
Testimonials
"...I've been relying on Stackz for my Japanese study the last six months - it has been really really helpful. [...] I can't tell you how much it has helped with my study." - a user's comment
"...Probably you already heard but I have to say it: The program is great!" - a user's comment
"...I have to say thank you for creating one of the best Japanese programs I have ever seen." - a student's comment
"...oh behold, this is exactly what I had been looking for 9 months ago! Ease of use, nice and simple graphic interface, lots of ready-made study lists." - a new user's comment
Reviews for Stackz 2.0 at download.com
Reviews for Stackz 2.1 at download.com
Reviews for Stackz 2006 at download.com
Stackz forum
