Supermemo method doesn't work for me

It looks like you've already made up your mind, but just in case other users are interested, I'm gonna comment on the Mnemosyne grading system, because there's where customisation lies.

Cards you are not learning yet: These are the grade 0 cards

Cards you are currently learning: grade 1 cards and a number of grade 0 cards that are added every day (this number is customisable). They stay in this group as long as you keep giving them a grade 1, therefore you can study then as many times as you want every day. When you think you know one of these flash cards you give it a grade 2. Doing that you tell Mnemosyne that you're ready and you're gonna try to move this word into the long term memory. Usually the first interval is 1-2 days.

Cards you are supposed to know: These are the cards you are tested on. There are four possible answers:

5: You know the answer too easily, so the program kinda bothered you with the asking, it should have waited more.

4: You know the answer readily, but you think the program has done well in making you recall the word right now. The interval chosen by the Mnemosyne is correct then.

3: You know the answer, but you really struggle to retrieve it from your memory. The program waited to much and you are starting to forget.

1-0: You forgot the word, so you've got to start the process again.

Some things to note:

1) The more you see a word outside the program, like when you read, the more likely it is to get a grade 5, and so the less often you see it inside the program.
2) If you are not satisfied with the intervals chosen by the program because they are too long, then give a grade 3 answer, that's how it is suppose to work.

3) In Mnemosyne only the next interval it's fixed, and that only after you have given your answer. That way the program can't forecast future intervals and so it can't show them to you. I can't see the point anyway.

4) I've used Mnemosyne for quite some time, and I've never experienced this massive forgetting phenomenon you talked about. Your other complain is even more strange, because in my experience the well known words just disappear into the program: you stop seeing them because the intervals become very long.

Let me quote your posts briefly. Pardon my long post again, please choose headings to read:

CONNECTIONS
>>The amount of time needed to have enough "neural connections" varies from word to word, and according to the amount of exposure and "elaboration" you have experienced.<<

Agree. As for word frequency, if a word is low-frequency, chances are that you’ll forget it very easily and, since it also doesn’t occur very frequently, usually it’s also not worth (at least) not so much attention. If a word is high-frequency, you’ll remember them anyway since usually you really need them. But the fact is many of the discussions regarding flashcards do focus on those low-frequency words. I find it counterintuitive to focus on low- rather than high-frequency words.
An analogy: as some of you know, I study linguistics from time to time. There is always academic vocabulary that no one else except linguistics students need. I’ll only acquire the vocab thru extensive reading. If I don’t understand it, I couldn’t even do my linguistics courses well. So, although they’re of course (very) low-frequency, I’ll have acquired them anyway by the time I’ve thoroughly gone thru the books. But then, in other words, academic vocab is of high-frequency since I personally need it.

Again, it returns to the logic: what’s the point of learning vocab you have no use for? What’s the point of remembering vocab you have no use for?

DEFINITIONS AND CONTENT OF ENTRIES
>>[It]'s often very difficult and useless to remember a definition "exactly", and anyway it's difficult to decide how to rate the guess. Software like this is good for learning stuff by heart, I believe, and that's NOT how someone should learn a language naturally. This method often works well with basic vocabulary (house, dog, etc. - All stuff that you either know or you don't) but not with other kinds of knowledge.<<

Agree. I also read the supermemo page about learning and forming good flashcard questions. But still, that doesn’t convince me well. And even with basic vocab and other kinds of knowledge, it’s just as pointless. By the logic above, you’ll remember basic vocab anyway with enough intensity. I personally can’t remember a lot of basic French vocab because I’m too occupied with German (becoming literate), linguistics and other subjects. But still, I can see that my French will improve simply thru exposure.

In Hong Kong I’m a very busy student and I can only read French while commuting, and it does help, though slowly. But clearly, without any gadgets, I can’t possibly use flashcards on the way. And back home, I’d so tired with the computer, leaving no room for flashcards. In short, I can’t maintain a flashcard routine. I’d save more time by reading with a book in my hand, and it does.

I’m not giving excuses, but there are just so many things that keep me from using flashcards. If you’re American, probably you’d have different problems but with the same consequence of not being able to concentrate on flashcards while sitting at the computer all the time. Why American? Just an example. Because the AJATT guy studied computer stuff and yet had so much time to master Japanese in such an unbelievable way. I can trust his testimony, but apparently, even though I’m also an undergraduate, I don’t believe at all that I could spend time like what he did during his time as an undergraduate. In short, you need time to master a language, and you need EVEN more time to use flashcards as well to master it. I can’t afford it.

CONTEXT
>>I am thinking that maybe I should write the examples and the pronunciation in the question, and only the definition in the answer, because it'd be easier that way, and after all we all see words in context, not alone.<<

As with spelling, collocation, parts of speech, pronunciation, word meaning and so on… everything can be put into context to learn. German-version Assimil books show this far more clearly than their French and English counterparts. Everything is annotated, especially the pronunciation, so the comprehensible input is being maximized there, even more so than the other Assimil books mentioned. As you know, English spelling is very troublesome.

But in this sense, you can also safely turn any text you come across into Assimil-style annotated texts. (But you should read Assimil books in order to understand my message)

What I think now is that Assimil texts would be the best form for learning. But if you want to learn pronunciation (intonation included), I think it’s more advisable to have audios as well – there are already many language programs, audio books, and so on, for English, so we have a wealth of audio material.

Another analogy: so Chinese is renowned for being difficult. How did I learn? I didn’t even learn Chinese with pinyin, unlike most Chinese kids of my time. We Hong Kong children could only use textbooks with characters only, and our teachers spoke aloud and repeat the pronunciation. Other than that, there were no more clues. And besides, just as in the lessons of your native language at school, of course our teachers provided a lot of comprehensible input, written and spoken. And if you consider also how people usually learn Latin (a language that you won’t speak, but just read), then you may see the point of reading texts as a way to master a language (at least in reading alone). If I read a Chinese novel now, I’ll definitely come across dozens of characters and words that I don’t even know. What do I do? I’ll also use a dictionary. Being a native doesn’t mean anything. I need a dictionary to read the pinyin.

CONTEXT(2)
>>Now I'm almost convinced that flash cards are not good for learning languages, unless you want to use flash cards that just consist of pairs such as "word to learn / word in your native language", which I disapprove of.<<

As you can guess, this will be without context. So, it just supports my logic that text reading is at least a viable and conventional way of learning any language.

CRITIQUE
>>Again, it returns to the logic: what’s the point of learning vocab you have no use for? What’s the point of remembering vocab you have no use for?<<

So, my main critique of flashcards is: why should you use a large mechanism to fix the meanings in your head? The mechanism of flashcards, effective algorithms notwithstanding, sounds hideous to me. In my cultural context, most girls would be intimidated right away. They wouldn’t want to use complicated mechanisms to learn something already complicated, namely vocab.

Another analogy: I read about an interesting internet forum thread about a tool for Japanese housewives. It’s a fake hand. What for? If you’re right-handed, you get a fake left hand, hold it with your own left hand, and you can cut vegetables safely without hurting your left hand. But if you’re careful enough, you’ll never hurt either hand. Flashcards sound like this fake hand to me. Why use a fake hand if you still have a healthy hand that you can use skillfully with vegetables? And in fact, however you cut vegetables, I think it’s better to use both hands to adjust how thin you slice the vegetables, because both hands can feel where it cuts right. Even if you had to use a fake left hand for unfortunate reasons, you still use it to help with cutting – but not a healthy hand WITH a fake hand. Pointless and superfluous.

The thing with writing flashcards, rating cards, and small matters like using the program itself, are also so needless. But most flashcard lovers make a good point that, usually, they recommend using an electronic dictionary instead of a paper one. I’ve been using Cambridge since 6 years ago and it always worked. I can’t avoid the computer anyway, but it doesn’t hurt too much to rely on an electronic one.

SETTING QUESTIONS
But I also agree that it’s better to write your own flashcards instead of copying large chunks of dictionary entries – doing so would block the whole screen, making everything almost unreadable. Any average dictionary’s interface itself would make a better place for those entries than your Anki or Mnemosyne.

Let’s say if you put short Q&A questions, in theory this is more preferable. But again, you can read supermemo’s page about that. They also recommend this.

But what kinds of short Q&A’s will you need?

Q: Which is the largest country by area?
A: Unless you’re still a fourth-grader or something, you definitely know it must be Russia.

Q: What can cause lung caner?
A: Ditto. Of course one must be heavy smoking. Several relatives of mine died exactly of lung cancer since they smoked almost throughout their life.

What about if:

Q: What is avant-garde?
A: (here comes the dictionary entry!) describes creative ideas, styles and methods that are very original or modern in comparison to the period in which they happen; belonging or relating to the avant-garde (courtesy of Cambridge)

For this question, if you already know avant-garde as an artist yourself, you wouldn’t even need this entry unless you want to remember avant-garde for the mere sake/fun of it. That doesn’t sounds interesting to me. For Chinese learners, my translation is 前衛. This word shouldn’t be too low-frequency, but merely two characters in my language can replace the whole entry, though not exactly. Here comes the main point: 前衛 doesn’t correspond to avant-garde, since the latter is usually in the sense of cinema and art. However, in the general sense, every Chinese should know what avant-garde is if you say前衛. Yet, if you learn this word as part of your specialized vocab, you should know the artistic sense before you enter only two characters to replace a whole entry.

If flashcards are that necessary, I think this avant-garde would make a good example. Other than that, most questions are completely unnecessary. If you use Anki/whatever, you wait for multiple seconds and then some more seconds to finish a question. But if you read your own art book/Assimil book/dictionary/whatever, usually it takes just as much time, but you reach the answer more quickly usually.

If I may use such collocation: I can safely hit the book far more often to read the same answer (the same "fact" as Anki puts it), until I can recall it by heart. Any experts of art/English grammar/linguistics can recall the relevant vocab for their subjects. If they forget some of these words in conversation, it's completely alright for the listeners. If they have to prepare it for homework/presentations/etc, they can safely check the information again and write up a good report.

I missed my point again, about setting questions:

so, it boils down to just one question: when should you use flashcards/when are they useful, and what to write?

1) For information you can check back anyway, such as whole dictionary entries, or a quote from a book that must be understood along with the context, a flashcard wouldn't offer enough space even for writing.
2) For information you won't find useful/have no use for, it isn't worth remembering anyway, not to mention to use a "fake hand" for that.

But then, how much information is there left for flashcards when you can hit the books almost all the time? Don't forget the time you also need in entering the cards itself.

Oh yes, there is such a phrase as "hit the books". I like both avant-garde and hit the books. Nice stuff.

So you see. Why can't you just hit the books? I'm yet to reveal information that you can't possibly hit without hitting books - since we still dwell on knowledge you can find on books.

Hi Xie,
just a few comments.
I am going to try Anki, and I hope it's finally what I need. The problem with Mnemosyne and my cards is:

1) Mnemosyne shows you the cards once a day at most. The minimum gap seems to be one day. It's too long for me, because I have realized that if I try to learn something, then repeat is a few hours later, and then the next day, it's much more effective. Anki can do that, and it can also show you a failed card ten minutes later.

2) How do you know how to grade your guess? What exactly do 1, 2, 3, ect. mean or imply? It's too hard to grade your own answer correctly: if 5 means you know it very well, how much is very well? As well as you know how Pennsylvania is spelled, or as well as your mom's name?
Anki avoid such rough guesses, and provides the time gaps: it writes the time gap above each button. I just added a card to test it: the first time you see a new card, the gaps are like fail=10 minutes, hard=10 hours, good=3 days, easy=8 days. As you can see, now at least you know what your grading will imply.

3) My cards sucked. They were word-definition(+examples) pairs. It's hard to think of an exact definition and then grade your own guess objectively. I think I'm going to make example(s)-definition cards. That would simulate natural exposure better.

The thing is, to be able to benefit from spaced repetition software, you need to understand its meaning, it's purpose, and use it the right way. It's very easy to make mistakes and see poor results as I did. I'll give it another try with Anki.

The purpose of such method is to "remember", not really to learn. If you don't see something often enough, you'll forget it. Now, you could say that if you don't see something often enough, it's not worth remembering it. But this is not true, at least in my case, because in my case "often enough" has to be "very often". It's probably because I don't practice enough, but for example, I don't see the word "tame" often enough for me to remember it as easily as the word "keyboard", but I feel the word "tame" is very important anyway if I really want to be almost like a native speaker. So the problem is what "often enough" means.
Without the spaced repetition method, in theory, it turns out that the often-enough requirement is rarely met. I see and use the basic words very often (ex: birthday, think, give, one), but I don't see the more advanced ones often enough, and I only see the most advanced ones rarely, plus I see them together with other advanced words which make the whole context difficult and frustrating to understand (ex: grisly, shimmer, vicious). I don't see any solutions to this problem other than using spaced repetition software to come across them "often enough for me", artificially.

Also, I must keep in mind that creating a flashcard or reviewing it must be a pretty quick process. On the supermemo website this fact is stressed. If you spend too much time thinking of the answers, you are probably doing something wrong. Either the cards are not good (information presented inefficiently), or you don't really know the card and you need to shorten the gaps. They say you should have fun while reviewing, and they were able to review a lot of cards a day. And one last thing: if you don't use this method every day, and possibly throughout the day, it's not going to be useful.

So far it hasn't worked with Mnemosyne, but I have made EVERY possible mistake (never ever used every day, sometimes I even skipped months!).
Now I want to try seriously, and with Anki. :)

You mean, knowledge you can find *in* books. :) You can (metaphorically) think of a book as a container of knowledge, so the knowledge is *in* the container.

- Kef

Mainly about issues from Johnny:

>>The problem with Mnemosyne and my cards is:
[…] Anki avoid such rough guesses, and provides the time gaps: it writes the time gap above each button. I just added a card to test it: the first time you see a new card, the gaps are like fail=10 minutes, hard=10 hours, good=3 days, easy=8 days. As you can see, now at least you know what your grading will imply.<<

We do need time to understand the algorithms behind every SRS. In fact, I preferred Anki to Mnemosyne, but just like Chrome vs. Firefox, Mnemosyne takes far less memory than Anki. It was also easier for Anki to crash. I admit that I’m always too impatient with flashcards in general, hence the negative comments above. Yet, despite its being rather complicated, I did find Anki to the best there was as an SRS.

>>It's too long for me, because I have realized that if I try to learn something, then repeat is a few hours later, and then the next day, it's much more effective. Anki can do that, and it can also show you a failed card ten minutes later.<<

It IS annoying to let the wording (grading, and time interval for reviewing) disturb my thinking about my own learning process. What’s more, if you forget something, such as you still don’t know how to conjugate English verbs to make the past perfect tense, you can perfectly check back within seconds by “hitting” the same book you have been using. There is where I raised the “fake hand”. It’s not exactly against a particular SRS, but an attitude of relying on SRS. With this in mind, I may consider picking up Anki again… (I can work with you by writing posts regularly if time allows!)

>>I think I'm going to make example(s)-definition cards. That would simulate natural exposure better.<<

It sounds a good idea, but it doesn’t have to be like that. If I can’t remember what “notwithstanding” means, I can safely look it up again in Cambridge. I think random sentences/expressions that come up during the day when I use google or something, anything worth memorizing (if I may call it), are more worth taking as flashcards. I did try this before. I won’t suggest dictionary entries in general, especially if the entries are too easy to find with a few clicks. You won’t need Anki to replace those few clicks.

http://idioms.thefreedictionary.com/, for example, I find it hard to browse the entries since the font is normally rather small and it stuffs all the expressions together. It’s intelligible, but I’d spend too many clicks in this site, unlike Cambridge/Lingoes (check lingoes.cn, a Chinese site for many free dictionaries). Anki is better for that.

It’s suggested also that, in theory, you can “mine” sentences from all kinds of sources. This is another reason why I won’t suggest dictionary entries. If there’s a sentence that you can’t find easily but is worth taking (this is hard to tell… but you’ll know what sounds right or wrong), probably it’s really worth taking.

>>The purpose of such method is to "remember", not really to learn. If you don't see something often enough, you'll forget it. Now, you could say that if you don't see something often enough, it's not worth remembering it. […] I don't see the word "tame" often enough for me to remember it as easily as the word "keyboard", but I feel the word "tame" is very important anyway if I really want to be almost like a native speaker. So the problem is what "often enough" means.<<

I don’t know what language you speak. But in my case, it’s been very clear that I use Chinese vocab rather differently from many many other Chinese. For the more “advanced” vocab, it often turns out that I don’t always get what others mean, whether they are undergraduates or housewives or high school kids or government officials. If you still don’t have a card for “tame”, probably you need it now; but you’re like me, you don’t, because you already knew this word before you brought this up.

>>[…] I don't see any solutions to this problem other than using spaced repetition software to come across them "often enough for me", artificially.<<

Some people will say to do it artificially is completely pointless, taking the literal meaning of artificial. But it’s just the same with my example above.
If you still don’t know how to conjugate English verbs to make the past perfect tense, you can look it up in a grammar book. In so doing you’re already doing “artificial” stuff by increasing exposure. No one knows better than you what kind of vocab you need to put in an SRS.

>> You mean, knowledge you can find *in* books.<<
Thanks. I make mistakes from time to time due to fatigue with the monitor.

Very often, I find it annoying to see some German words I don't know. I may know their existence by reading an Assimil book in German (where normal German is written for German speakers). And on the way home, or when I walk to the university library after lunch, or when I wait for the subway, it always comes up and annoys me.

Two of them are
1) jeweilig: (attributive adjective) respective, prevailing (government)
2) jeweils: (adv) at a time, each time, each (member of a group)

If you aren't learning German, of course you don't need to know what they are. But to show you my feeling... if you don't fix the meanings of such words in your head through extensive reading - even if you only read all the sample sentences/expressions given in your German-English/monolingual dictionary, chances are you'll also forget them. The trick is NOT to let them escape out of your hand, when they come to your hand suddenly thru the air - when you commute, when you're eating, since you've met them before.

A German proverb is called:
aller guten Dinge sind drei! (prov)
(all good things come in threes!)

If you meet a beautiful girl briefly for the first time, most likely you won't know whether you can meet her again. Same for the second time. But the Germans say, if there's a third time, it's very good. Like this proverb, if I meet her for a third time, I won't let her go away. Although this proverb is virtually unknown among the Chinese, many romance stories in Chinese films do take place after at least 3 meetings...

It's completely OK if you don't have the time, like me, to learn jeweilig and jeweils. The same if you're too busy to meet yet another beautiful girl. Everybody understands your difficulties. But whether you remember a word or not is completely a game with time. Either you remember a word, or you don't. There's no in between. For people who learn languages without an SRS (or even do perfectly without it), they do it simply by repeating the same process/routine again and again.

I think I judge the value of flashcards (format is important, as I wrote about above) by ... mainly whether it can be treated as independent of my own textbooks, books, texts, anything else. Again, I don't suggest dictionary entries because they always remain in the dictionary, and I won't bother to type/copy the same stuff again and again to an SRS.

I understand what you mean when you say that you can just check what you need in a dictionary instead of using SRS. It doesn't take much to just look up a word, so why use SRS? Well, the thing is, SRS makes the whole process automatic. You don't have to worry about remembering to look up anything, because SRS remembers that for you.
I find it frustrating to try to read a novel where there are, say, ten words I don't know on each page. Do I have to stop reading and look them up every time? That'd be very annoying. So I write them down and I look them up later. And after that, will I remember them? In my case, the answer is no, and looking them up is like a waste of time, because by the time I see one of these words again, too much time will have passed and I'll feel like I've never seen that word (Ex: I only see a word once on page 50, only spend 30 seconds on it when I look it up in the dictionary, and then maybe see it again on page 400).
So if I have a program that automatically and regularly tells me "Hey, do you still remember this word? You still should", then by the time I see a word again on page 400, I won't feel puzzled anymore, because I'll have seen it more than once already. Otherwise, on page 400, I'd still be puzzled and frustrated because I still don't understand any of those ten new words.
The software is supposed to give you what you need automatically and efficiently.

That is way I feel I need to use Anki now.

"1) Mnemosyne shows you the cards once a day at most. The minimum gap seems to be one day."

I told you it's not that way, but it seems that you don't want to listen. You have a list of words (grade 1) you can go trough as many times as you want. The session with Mnemosyne is divided in three parts: first you do the cards scheduled for today, then the new cards for today (grade 0) and finally the grade 1 group. You can spend the rest of the day working on this group because no other words are going to be shown. So you can review them in the morning and then later in the evening.

"2) How do you know how to grade your guess? What exactly do 1, 2, 3, etc. mean or imply? It's too hard to grade your own answer correctly: if 5 means you know it very well, how much is very well? As well as you know how Pennsylvania is spelled, or as well as your mom's name?"

Yes, it's terribly difficult, actually it's one of the biggest problems the human kind faces nowadays. Try to look at it this way, it might be easier: You are not grading yourself, you grade the program!!!. Yes, it's as simple as this:

4: You thing the program has done well.
3: You thing the program waited too much.
5: You thing the program should have waited a bit more.

"Anki avoid such rough guesses, and provides the time gaps: it writes the time gap above each button. I just added a card to test it: the first time you see a new card, the gaps are like fail=10 minutes, hard=10 hours, good=3 days, easy=8 days. As you can see, now at least you know what your grading will imply."

In my view the 10 minutes and 10 hours periods are a bit of a joke, because it presumes that you are gonna be in front of your computer in that time and you will be eager to do SRS. I don't know about others, but in my case that's usually not true. I think the once a day is enough commitment. You don't even need to do the practise at the same time every day, and if you haven't been adding new words recently you can skip a day every know and then with no damage. I never do all the repetitions in one sitting either.

There's another reason why I don't think that making the interval visible by the user is a good idea. People are not good at guessing how well they'll remember something in the future when they have just learnt it, that's one of the principles behind SRS. In your case is even worse because it seems that you are under the average. You have trouble evaluating how well you remember a word now, so how the hell are you gonna work out the optimal next interval yourself? Duh.

>>[…]Well, the thing is, SRS makes the whole process automatic. You don't have to worry about remembering to look up anything, because SRS remembers that for you.[…]<<

I’ll second that.

A real case of mine: I also used to write notes in a notebook while going through the lessons of French with ease. In case you don’t know..this is just a textbook for learning French. So I wrote and wrote. I’m not Anglophone, so there were actually a lot of words/expressions I didn’t know. In most cases, I wrote notes about French; but sometimes, I also wrote notes about English itself. (the moral of this story is that you should master a language completely, or pretty close to that, before you learn another language) Anyway, I just kept on writing, and I ended up with half a book full of notes – you have similar notes as such when you have math/history lessons/whatever.

However, my notes fell into disuse along with my French. If I’m to read the same book again, I have to refer to the same notebook too. Sometimes I wrote badly that I can’t recognize what I wrote before. This is how Anki may prove useful for some other trivial matters. It’d have been more convenient to keep notes in Anki instead.

Another issue is when you can delete flashcards. When I read French with ease again, now in German, most pronunciation notes I wrote before are now unnecessary. If I had saved them as flashcards, I can safely delete them since I’ve already internalized them through time. If deleting is necessary, I may also do something instead, such as storing these cards as archives. I don’t find it terribly interesting to keep 5000 flashcards even if there are only 300 obsolete (i.e. no longer useful) cards. Even after 1000, you can start to discard some of them…

Here's the grading system I used with SuperMemo:

5 - answer without hesitation (< 10% of all reviews)
4 - answer with hesitation (80%? of all reviews)
3 - recalling the answer took major effort AND/OR answer missing some part that you do not consider critical.
2 - no answer or incorrect answer, but when you see the correct answer, you go "Damn it! I was THIS close!"
1 - no answer or incorrect answer, and the correct answer looks familiar
0 - "WTF is this item doing in my collection?"

The goal is to get as many 4's as possible. 5 means you are reviewing the item too frequently (wasting time). 3 is good too -- I think Piotr Wozniak claims the more effort it takes to make a successful review, the stronger the memory trace (but I cannot locate a quote, so I may be wrong here).

Here is a general quote from the SuperMemo FAQ:

The main boundary is between Pass and Fail. Pass means "I remember well enough". Fail means "I failed to remember to my standard". Good is simply slightly better than Pass. Good will also statistically produce slightly longer intervals. However, if you are not sure when to use Good and when to use Pass, you can use Pass then when you want an item to appear again in the final drill. The only place where grades are very important is where you distinguish between Pass or more, and Fail or less. Differences between Pass, Good and Bright are less important. Differences between Fail, Bad and Null are less important. Beginners can limit their grading to Good and Fail and still do well in learning!

Johnny -- why don't you try SuperMemo? Mnemosyne and Anki may be simpler to use, but they both use a slightly modified version of the SM-2 algorithm (developed by Piotr Wozniak 22 years ago). See http://www.supermemo.com/english/algsm11.htm for an overview of the algorithm's development. The earliest SM algorithm that I used was SM-6.

Yes, SuperMemo's interface is annoying. You have to learn to work around its quirks. But I have to say, I used it for many years without major problems. And let's face it -- Photoshop is much more complicated. :)