Hints & Tips

Work with FullRecall regularly

Using FullRecall every day is best. It's better to spend every day 1 minute learning with FullRecall, than spending 7 minutes every 7 days. Also note that FullRecall schedules reviews with 1 day resolution, but learning regularly even without the software pays off!

Don't be negligent during repetitions

Even if you remember a fact well, spend at least a few seconds thinking about it (the best would be to use a association using imagination here — some mnemonics) before going to the next item.

Don't give up

After some time (e.g. a month), you may have a feeling that you don't learn much and that it's extremely hard to learn anything with FullRecall — you have so many repetitions and serious problems with recollecting answers. Remember that FullRecall doesn't repeat you items you remember well, but only these hard to remember that you're close to forgetting! Keep in mind that in your learning process are many elements that you do remember well — they are just not shown to you in order to not waste your time.

Keep questions and answers as short and simple as possible

Every time you repeat a item (and you'll have many repetitions) you'll have to read a question and an answer. The shorter the question and answer are, the less time you waste on the item. (Note that you should spend some time on every item, but ideally, spend a lot of time thinking about the answer, that reinforces your remembering of this item).

Don't add every information to FullRecall

Not everything is worth keeping in your memory, even though you can retain it in your memory (with help of FullRecall) relatively cheaply. Some facts are better off on paper, on your notebook, palmtop, or remain accessible though google, than in your memory and FullRecall database. This is because there is a price to pay for keeping something in memory (time spend on reviews, even though they are scheduled on optimal days, and interference with other information) and for some facts (i.e., facts you won't use much in the future, if at all) it won't pay off. It's up to you to judge what it's worth retaining in your memory. Your judgment and priorities may change in the future—don't hesitate to delete from your database elements you think are not worth keeping in your memory anymore.
On the other hand, bear in mind that keeping in memory facts you remembered a long time ago is now very cheap (in terms of time spend on necessary reviews); it's the first days, weeks and months of keeping an information in memory that you pay the highest price for keeping it in memory; the longer you keep something in memory, the less price you pay for keeping it even longer (i.e., intervals between scheduled reviews start to be separated by order of years).

Exec tags

FullRecall allows to use external programs (e.g. mplayer) to handle (for example) multimedia files.
By putting <exec>a_command</exec> in a question/answer you'll make run a_command when the question/answer is shown.
Thus you can use, for example, a movie:
<exec>mplayer /a/path/to/a_movie.mpg</exec>
and many other things. (NOTE: in order to use exec tags, you need to activate them in Settings.)

Other

• Click with the middle mouse button on question (or answer) field to turn on edit-mode.
• Clicking two times with left mouse button on a word selects the word; three times: selects a line.
• There is a context menu under right mouse button with some useful functions.
• You can use an Unicode character picker (like this one) to copy&paste Unicode characters into FullRecall (if you get a "square" in place of pasted character: make sure a question/answer font that is set in FullRecall Options cover the characters pasted, if not: set proper font. See this for more info).
• If you want to go though scheduled reviews only in some categories, click "Learn" with the right mouse button.