gHacks technology news » vocabulary trainer http://www.ghacks.net A technology blog covering software, mobile phones, gadgets, security, the Internet and other relevant areas. Tue, 24 Nov 2009 03:24:03 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.8.6 en hourly 1 Quizlet Sometimes it is fun to learn online http://www.ghacks.net/2008/05/13/quizlet-sometimes-it-is-fun-to-learn-online/ http://www.ghacks.net/2008/05/13/quizlet-sometimes-it-is-fun-to-learn-online/#comments Tue, 13 May 2008 07:26:28 +0000 Martin http://www.ghacks.net/?p=4106 Learning can be fun. I would not have believed that sentence when I was young and had to go to school but nowadays I have to admit that it can indeed be fun. The Internet helped a lot because it provides interactivity which is excellent for learning purposes. Quizlet was only recently mentioned in my article about a vocabulary trainer by Grimskallen. It basically is an online community that creates flashcards about all sorts of topics giving everyone the opportunity to learn by selecting one out of five interactive learning modes available on the site.

When a user enters the website he can choose to pick one of the topics presented on the homepage which is a mixture of popular and recent sets as well as some categories like learning languages, history, math and GRE, SAT or TOEFL test sets. Besides that he can use the site search to find sets for specific keywords among the 270.000 sets available.

If you had to learn for an history seminar about Napoleon you would enter his name and find the five corresponding sets, a search for German revealed 781 sets and one for business 114. This is also one of the major improvements and advantages of Quizlet, the main emphasize is not only to help learning languages but also any other topic one can imagine.

quizlet

Unregistered users can work with four of the five available tests. Two, Scatter and Space Race, are little flash games where the user has to drop corresponding items on each other or typing them making sure they do not reach the end of the screen.

Familiarize provides an option to go through the whole set one by one and Test looks pretty much like a test that pupils would receive in school. It displays all terms dividing them into written-, multiple choice- and true or false questions.

The last option Learn is only available for registered users. Learn is without doubt the most interesting one because it keeps track of your progress and retests on the ones that the user got wrong.

Registered users can also create their own sets which is a great opportunity to learn. One thing that I think is missing is a way to correct errors and typos in sets from other users. I participated in a World War II test and one of the questions were about the German lightning warfare. I entered the term Blitzkrieg only to be corrected that I was wrong, the answer was Blitzkreig which is obviously wrong. Unfortunately though there was no way to correct that term or report it.

This means that parents should make sure that the sets for their children are providing the correct answers, nothing is worse than learning false information. A way to rate sets and users would also be a great addition.

Quizlet is still a wonderful website that assists in learning all kinds of topics.

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]]> http://www.ghacks.net/2008/05/13/quizlet-sometimes-it-is-fun-to-learn-online/feed/ 6 Vocabulary Trainer http://www.ghacks.net/2008/05/12/vocabulary-trainer/ http://www.ghacks.net/2008/05/12/vocabulary-trainer/#comments Mon, 12 May 2008 11:54:20 +0000 Martin http://www.ghacks.net/?p=4097 If you are in school you have to learn vocabulary all the time. First in your native language and later on in other languages. A vocabulary trainer aids the pupil in learning those words. A simply vocabulary trainer is VocabOne by Zeniko Software, It does not come with fancy tests, animated characters and other stuff that looks great but does not provide any value other than that.

It’s a basic trainer that displays a word and requests the answer to be typed into the answer box. The next page will display the answer of the vocabulary trainer and your answer so that it is easy to compare the result. Statistics can be enabled that display how many words have been correctly answered so far.

One option that is well done is to flip languages on the fly. Instead of translating Latin to German it is also possible to translate German to Latin. The author provides three vocabulary sets on his website, German-Esperanto, German-Dutch and German-Latin. The format of the files is relatively straightforward and it should not take long to create your own data sets.

vocabulary trainer

The format of the vocabulary sets is always the same, it begins with the name in the first line (#Name) and lists all words and their translations in the other lines. The word(s) and their translations are separated by a “_” sign. The line for the English word car and the German translation Auto would look like this: car_auto. If several words have the same meaning they can be added with the “;”character. car;automobile_auto;automobile.

The main problem that most users will face is that VocabOne does not provide enough vocabulary sets which means that they have to be created before the user can use the vocabulary trainer.

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