Anki
I told someone that I'd make a short post about Anki, so here goes.
The short version: Anki is an electronic flash card program. You create flash cards, then drill on them every day. Cards that you know well show up less often than newer cards or cards you've missed in the past. Anki tries to space out cards scientifically so that remembering them drills them deeper into your memory.
So why do I use Anki? It comes down to a few reasons:
1. Rosetta Stone doesn't teach all the concepts I need it to teach. (And in fact, it often teaches things in a non-optimal order.). More generally, I have multiple books and CD audio series that I can use as source material, so I need to find a way to gather it all in one place.
2. Rosetta Stone doesn't provide flash cards. If you get stuck on one or two entries in a lesson, you need to manually navigate back to the whole lesson, find the cards that you missed and redo them. All manual labor.
3. Rosetta Stone's recall exercises (the ones that foster active learning) are somewhat rare.
4. Anki gets a lot of high marks from people who study languages.
So I'll start with the bad parts of Anki first: it is kind of a complex beast to navigate. It doesn't have a particularly friendly user interface, and honestly, if you want to do anything interesting with your deck, you need to at least be somewhat proficient with web pages (html, css). Most of your data ends up being database entries and UI is mostly "let's look up database entries and edit them". So I find I'm spending some of my time every week just designing databases and how they are visually displayed to me.
Now, the cool stuff about Anki.
Anki does a good job of keeping me from needing to reenter data that appears on multiple cards. You design a data type. Each data type has a list of fields and a list of cards that go with it. Then you add one database entry, and fill in all of the fields. Anki then adds all the cards to the deck. Each card can reference different fields in the data entry.
Here is an example I've made for Russian nouns.
Type: Russian Noun
Fields: Word (text), Picture, Audio, Notes.
Card 1 - front audio. Rear picture & text - teaches recognition of audio
Card 2 - front word. Rear picture & audio - teaches recognition of written word
Card 3 - front picture, audio, and a text entry field. Rear - checks what you wrote against the word - teaches proper spelling.
Card 4 - front picture and a text entry field. Rear - what you wrote against the word spelling - teaches active recall of word.
One of the things I discovered is that Anki starts with one card and buries the others. Once you get the first card right, it starts unburying cards. So it makes sense to design your cards so that the easiest cards are first, and the ones that require the most recall are last. (In the long run, the cards you get wrong will show up more often, but this approach makes it more likely that you'll remember the cards correctly in the first place).
Here are some other types I've been using (to a much lesser extent)
Basic Concept Card
Side 1: some text
Side 2: the translation or answer
I use this one very sparingly, as I try to keep my cards entirely in Russian. Mostly, I used this entry to bootstrap some russian grammar terminology. At some point I'll probably be able to remove these entries.
Grammar:
Fields: Sentence, Base word, conjugated word
Card 1 - shows a sentence with a blank for a word, along with the base word as a hint. Answer: the word properly conjugated for the sentence
Card 2 - same as the first, but no hint. Presumably the entries are good enough that the word is obvious.
The intent of these cards are mostly to test that I know what case goes where in the grammar, but it also reinforces whether i know how to conjugate a word properly. However, cards that force you to know two different concepts are sometimes a little harder to learn so I also added....
Noun Conjugation:
Fields: 12 entries for all of the 6 russian cases in both singular and plural
Cards: 11 cards -- each card shows the nominative singular case and asks you for one of the other entries.
I only have a few words using this pattern, mostly words that follow the standard grammar rules. But there are so many exceptions that I'll probably enter 5-10 other words in here for the most common spelling rules. After that, I'll probably just grumble and add extra grammar cards for the special cases. After all, there's nothing wrong with having the same sentence with the same grammatical rule, but have it teach a special case noun conjugation.
One site suggests that every card should have a picture (or even patterns to the images/words used) but I haven't designed all my cards that way yet. I'm mostly using pictures and audio in my noun cards right now. I think I have optional audio fields on some of my grammar tests. As I get better at this, I can either add or replace card entries.
One nice thing about this design is that you can edit the card styling and all the cards are automatically updated. For example, my noun cards link to a russian-only dictionary where I can try to read a definition for it.
I'll probably add an entry type that just speaks or shows a sentence and asks me if I understand it. Forcing me to retype an entire sentence is something Rosetta Stone tries to do, but I find it to be a real bear.
Anyway, I would say that if you don't mind getting your feet wet with a clunky interface and a little bit of database/web programming, Anki is a great solution.