Here’s my one-line review of SuperMemo.net:

And I thought SuperMemo for Windows was hard to use.

First off, there are many bugs due to insufficient testing. I tried SuperMemo.net on two browsers: Firefox 3.6 and Internet Explorer 8. In the first case, I was unable to add sounds to my items (Firefox reported an “outdated plugin”). Is it so hard to use Flash the way every other website does it?

In the second case, SuperMemo refused to enable rich-text editing, claiming that I need IE 7. Guess they forgot that there are newer versions of IE out there.

But the worst thing is the half-baked interface. Adding new items, editing items and browsing through your items all take way too many clicks. The system names every item “New item”, which makes it impossible to locate an item in the list of items (and there is no way to go to the next/previous item!). Setting a font size for all your items is impossible.

If using SuperMemo had been this hard back when I was in high school, I would have never become a SuperMemo user. In its current state, SuperMemo.net is absolutely unsuitable for learners who want to build their own collections.

Time for the big announcement that I promised you a few days ago. I have just launched an awesome new site for questions about the English language, other languages, and language learning methods. It’s called Ask Antimoon.

If you are learning a foreign language (and taking it seriously) and/or like helping others with their language questions, Ask Antimoon will be the perfect place for you.

What’s so exciting about this new site, you ask? For starters, it’s not a discussion forum. It’s a Q&A site, also called a “knowledge exchange”. Here’s how it’s different:

• Every new topic is a question.
• Everyone posts only one answer.
• Everyone replies to the original question (not other people’s answers), so the communication stays on topic.
• If you want to add something to your answer, you edit it.
• The best answers (as voted by users) are moved to the top of the page.

The second exciting thing are the community features:

• You can vote on questions and answers, flag them as spam/offensive, etc.
• If other people find your questions and answers valuable, you will get reputation points.
• Reputation points enable you to do more things on Ask Antimoon, e.g. edit other people’s posts or close questions. Users with a lot of reputation have moderator-like powers.

So if you have a great question about any language or about language-learning methods, ask it on Ask Antimoon! And one more thing: make sure you read the Ask Antimoon FAQ before posting to prevent unpleasant surprises :)

I have just updated my online keyboard for typing English transcriptions with IPA phonetic symbols. Here is a list of recent changes:

• New /t̬/ symbol which is increasingly used in English dictionaries to show places where flap t is pronounced in American English. This symbol is typed with the Ctrl+TT shortcut (hold Ctrl, press T twice).
• /ɪ/ and /ʊ/ have been replaced with /ɪ/ and /ʊ/, following the convention used in the latest edition of the Oxford English Dictionary. Both symbols represent “weak” vowels that can be reduced to /ə/, e.g. in /ˈbju:tɪfʊlnəs/.
• /ɜ/, /ɛ/ and /ɝ/ are now typed with Ctrl+3 (3 has to be pressed one, two or three times) instead of Ctrl+E. Previously, the user had to press E five or six times to type some of these symbols.
• You can superscript any part of text, which is useful for representing optional sounds in words like feel /fi:əl/.
• You can now use Ctrl+I and Ctrl+B on selected text to italicize or bold it.
• There is a new list of recommended IPA fonts available on various platforms.

If you study English pronunciation long enough, you will eventually run into one of the following situations:

• You look up a word in two dictionaries, and each dictionary gives a different pronunciation. For example, one dictionary transcribes statutory as /ˈstætʃətəri/, another as /ˈstætjʊtəri/.
• You hear a native speaker pronounce a word in a way that sounds different from the pronunciation given in the dictionary. For example, your dictionary says calm is pronounced /kɑ:m/, but your American friend keeps saying /kɑ:lm/.
• You read a rare word or proper name and you don’t know how to pronounce it. For example, you may not know how to pronounce words like azure, Ottawa or Scorsese.

It is in situations like these that an English pronunciation dictionary can come in handy. Specialized pronunciation dictionaries have more words (including proper names) and more pronunciation variants. Phonetic transcriptions in a pronunciation dictionary also tend to be more detailed and more accurate.

With this in mind, I have written an in-depth comparison of two major English pronunciation dictionaries — the Cambridge English Pronouncing Dictionary (17th edition) and the Longman Pronunciation Dictionary (3rd edition). If you think you need an authoritative resource on English pronunciation, check out which dictionary has won in my test.

Read more…