If you have ever learnt a language, or had to cram lots of information for some kind of exam, you may be familiar with the palm card technique, where you write a question on once side of a card and the answer on the other side, and test yourself to see what questions you can answer. Rote is a program that does this on your computer.
Rote assumes an input file that is a series of lines consisting of a question, then the delimiter :
, then the answer.
Assuming you are in a command-line environment with awk installed, you begin the program by typing rote filename where the filename is the file of question and answer pairs. Rote will prompt you for a mode.
Mode 1: typing mode is selected by typing 1 and then return at the prompt. You will now be displayed questions one at a time, and you must type the exact answer, followed by a return.
Mode 2: speaking mode is selected by typing 2 and then return at the prompt. You will now be displayed questions one at a time and rote will wait for you to type a return before giving you an answer. When you have read the answer, you can mark it true by typing another return, false by typing any other character and then return. This mode is for situations where the answers are so long that you can’t be bothered typing them.
The Truefile: if you type a filename when prompted for a truefile, rote will append correctly answered lines to a file of this name.
The Falsefile: if you type a filename when prompted for a falsefile, rote will append incorrectly answered lines to a file of this name.
Now you are ready to cram information into your brain. A warning: rote learning of material is highly useful in quite specific and well-chosen areas of learning. It is not, however, the primary aspect of learning any field of human knowledge or know-how. In theoretical fields, the primary issue is a genuine systematic understanding of the whole and how things fit together, not a sum of facts. In the case of more practical fields, like use of a foreign language, the primary issue is fluency in actual language use, not the ability to recall individual facts about the language. On the other hand, there are specific cases where rote learning is very useful.