Verse Memorizer

About the Verse Memorizer

Learn a passage by heart the way people have long done it: read it, then recall it with less and less help. Pick a passage of the Quran (Tanzil’s Uthmani or simple script), the Bhagavad Gita in Sanskrit, Gurbani from eight banis including Japji Sahib and Sukhmani Sahib, the Bible (World English Bible), or paste any text in any script — a shloka, a hymn, a poem, a speech.

Practise it five ways: type or tap the first letter of each word, recite with more and more words hidden, fill the gaps, put the lines in order, and take a recall test where you recite (or type) the whole passage and mark what you got wrong. Words you miss are counted, so the page can show where the weak spots are, and passages on your review list come back for a test when they are due — sooner when you struggled, later when you knew them well. Print the passage as flash cards for practice away from the screen. Everything stays in your browser.

Common uses

• Hifz students practising the day’s new lesson and revision away from the mushaf.
• Learning the Nitnem banis, a chapter of the Gita or a Sunday-school memory verse.
• Students memorising a poem, a speech or the lines of a play.
• Teachers printing flash cards of a passage for a class.

The drills

• First letters: the words are hidden; type (or tap) the first letter of the next word. One wrong letter marks the word as missed; a second shows it. A good way to start recalling a passage you have just read.
• Hide words: the passage with a quarter, half, three quarters or all of its words hidden. Recite it and tap only the words you cannot remember.
• Fill the gaps: about one word in four is missing; choose it from four words of the same passage.
• Order the lines: the parts of the passage in a mixed order; tap them in the right order.
• Recall test: recite the whole passage from memory against a timer, then show it part by part and tap each word you got wrong — or type it and let the page compare it word by word (right, wrong, missed or extra).

Why recall rather than rereading: testing yourself helps memory last. In one well-known experiment, students who practised recalling a text remembered more of it a week later than students who spent the time rereading it (Roediger and Karpicke, Test-Enhanced Learning, Psychological Science).

The review schedule

Each passage on your review list has a schedule worked out with SM-2, the SuperMemo 2 algorithm. A recall test grades it from the share of words right: 100% is 5, 90% or more is 4, 75% or more is 3, 50% or more is 2, 25% or more is 1 and less is 0. A grade of 3 or more sets the next test 1 day later, then 6 days later, then each gap times an easiness factor that grows with good grades (rounded up to whole days); a grade below 3 brings the passage back the next day. Only the first recall test of a day moves the schedule (a failed test later that day still brings it back tomorrow); the other drills are practice and only add to the missed words.

The texts and their terms

• Quran: the Tanzil Quran Text in Uthmani or simple script, shown verbatim (Creative Commons Attribution 3.0; changing the text is not allowed). The bismillah above a surah is shown as its heading and can be practised with the first ayah; in Al-Fatiha it is ayah 1.
• Bhagavad Gita: the Sanskrit verses of the gita/gita dataset (public domain under The Unlicense), with one half-verse per line; its 701 verses include Arjuna’s question that opens chapter 13, which some editions leave out. An IAST transliteration can be shown under each line.
• Gurbani: Japji Sahib, Jaap Sahib, Tav Prasad Savaiye, Benti Chaupai Sahib, Anand Sahib, Rehras Sahib, Sohila Sahib and Sukhmani Sahib from the Shabad OS Database (public domain, on the condition that the words are never altered so as to distort them), with its pause marks (vishraams).
• Bible: the World English Bible Updated (public domain), all 66 books and the deuterocanonical books.

The drills only hide, shuffle or compare words on your screen; the texts themselves are never changed.

Typing in Arabic, Devanagari and Gurmukhi

Use any keyboard: the phone’s own Arabic, Hindi or Punjabi keyboard, an Urdu or Persian layout, or tap the letters the page offers. First letters compare the base letter only (أ, إ, آ and ٱ all count as ا; ਉ counts as ੳ and ਆ as ਅ, as in Gurbani first-letter search). A typed recall ignores vowel marks, Quranic signs, nukta and tippi or bindi, and lets one typed word stand for two written ones (يا أيها typed as one word) or two for one.

Limitations

• It checks words, not pronunciation: it does not listen to your recitation, so it cannot judge tajweed, makharij or the lengths of vowels. Practise with a teacher for those.
• A typed check can count a correct spelling variant as wrong; the page shows what you typed for each word marked wrong, so you can judge it yourself.
• Some devices have no font with every Quranic sign, and a few small marks of the Uthmani script may then look wrong; switch to the simple script, or install a Quran font such as Amiri Quran.
• Texts other than the ones listed are not built in, and neither are translations other than the World English Bible. Paste another text under “Your own text” only if its licence lets you copy it.
• A passage can have up to 400 parts and 6,000 words; Order the lines works with up to 40 parts and a typed check with up to 1,500 words.
• Your review list is kept in this browser only. Download a backup now and then.

Privacy

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