Foreign words memorization app

Question

I am looking for a better alternative to Teach2000.org, the feature requirements are:

• Properly accept foreign Unicode keyboards on the OS (without trying to do any magic itself like Teach2000)
• Have a reasonable set of different memorization modes like:
  • Fully random
  • Repeat a small subset of words till you know them perfectly (something similar to what Teach2000 calls interval training (Paul Pimsleur))
• Keep track of number of mistakes and allow training only a subset of words
• Free (normally not a requirement, but I will be sharing this with all students of a course)

It should work at least on Windows, but the more cross platform it is the better (e.g. including an Android app/interface would be very nice, but not a requirement).

Answer 1

Anki is what you are looking for: ankisrs.net

The idea is dead simple:

1. you create question/answer cards that you put in decks (so if you want to learn foreign words, you can create a deck for French level 1, French level 2, Spanish, whatever you want)
2. for each deck you can specify how many cards you want to learn per learning session
3. during a session, after each answer you have to tell anki whether you know about it or not, and anki will ask again the questions that you failed the most
4. you can share decks so you can download one of the thousands decks available for lots of languages and other subjects. In your case, you can share the deck with your student directly, or share it on the anki website and tell your students to grab it from there.
5. there are free clients available for windows, linux, android, etc. I use ankidroid and it's possible to use the android's voice synthesis to spell out the different words to get an idea of the spelling :)