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Tahfizh management software

This is the English version (with heavy editing) of my earlier post, which is actually an email posting to various mailing list.

Some facts about memorizing the Quran

Fact 1: As a Malay saying says, “Apal kaji karena diulang”, something is memorized because you repeat it.

Fact 2: Memorizing itself is easy. To continue memorizing new materials while retaining old materials is extremely difficult.

Fact 3: Something that we have memorized will eventually be forgotten, except if we repeat the material before it is forgotten.

Fact 4: The more repetition, the stronger our memory for the material, even if we initially memorized the material years ago. The obvious example is surah Al-Fatihah, that we have memorized years ago. It will never be forgotten because we repeat it at least seventeen times a day. On the other hand, a newly memorized surah will be easily forgotten because we never repeat it.

Fact 5: because the time allocated to the tahfiz program is limited (especially for us who are doing tahfiz on a part-time basis), we need a strategic repetition, i.e. we repeat the parts that has the biggest risk to be forgotten.

Imagine a software

From those facts, I imagine a software that:

1. log our progress in memorizing the Quran. For example, this ayat is memorized at this date.
2. log which part (from those that have been memorized) that is repeated on a particular day. The software will also log my self-assessment on the repetition, i.e. whether I still remember the part perfectly, or half remember, or totally forgotten already.
3. Based on the two logs above, I imagine that the software can calculate the probability of forgetting of any particular part. And based on the calculation, the software should tell me every day which part that I should repeat.

So when I am about to do my revision, I will simply press the button, and the program will say read page 100, 105, 130, and 145. Then I revised those pages, and key in some feedback about my memory, and the software keeps it in the log. The same thing happen when I start the revision again in the following day, I will press a button, and the software will suggest another set of pages, based on the calculation of the risk of forgetting.

Note that the above calculation algorithm is not a rocket science. A decent flash card program will have that algorithm. An example for this kind of program is Mnemosyne.

When I ask Uncle Google about such software, I found none. Of course, there are a lot of programs that will claim to help you memorize, for example by providing audio example (from a famous reciter) on how to read a particular verse, or even by repeating one or more verses in many combination of repetition.

But then again, this is not  the most difficult part of memorizing the Quran (see Fact 2 above). What we need is something to help us identify which part of the Quran that we are in the verge of forgetting.

NOTE: I recently found HifzHelper, a website that has the (early) ingredients of my dream.

Why do we need a software?

Deep in my heart, I asked this question: why make it so hard, that I will need a software to memorize the Quran? The people of the past did not use any software, and they became the huffazh (the memorizers of the Quran).

Well, you do not really need a software if you do this (memorizing the Quran) full time. The people of the past did this, and many people in our time still do.

But if you do this on a part-time basis, with the full-time job lurking to take away your time for other things, the challenges are totally different. If you can only allocate so much time to memorize and revise, then you really need to focus you revision to things that really matters: the parts that are nearly forgotten.

The method I describe above is irrelevant if you have so much time dedicated for tahfizh. By “so much” I mean about four to six hours a day. But most people cannot allocate that much time for the tahfizh, and yet they still have every intention to be a hafizh one day, yours truly included. That is why I dream about this software.

Another important note is that I do not dream this to eliminate the need for a teacher. This software is a tool for revision only, to help you focus on the important parts that you need to revise. You still need a teacher, another hafizh, to listen to (and validate) your recitation. This is the tradition that has been going on since the time of the Prophet Muhammad s.a.w. because this is how the Quran is preserved. The Quran is not preserved by the written text, but by writing it in the memory of the huffazh.

Let me know what your thoughts are in the comments section.