Vocabulary training
Vocabulary training
My wife is currently preparing some exams, among which she will have one in English.1 Obviously, she has a need to train her vocabulary.
I promised her to search a program that would let her enter the vocabulary and to train it appropriately – ideally in an intelligent way. By-the-way: We’re talking about a Mac OS X software.
I found around 10 possible candidates that I had a closer look at. (That is, I had a look at their feature list and screen-shots) 90% were deemed unusable, most for their gruesome interfaces that did not follow Apples HI Guidelines.
The remaining candidate, however, seemed like the perfect tool for vocabulary testing: UniLingua, developed by Harderware in Germany.
The screen-shot on the right shows the main interface of the tool. The user can easily set-up an unlimited number of databases; each of them can have unlimited categories in turn.
Nothing special so far. The nifty part of the tool is definitely its “Training Mode”. The soon-to-be-released new version of the program will feature a much improved and powerful training mode.
Each word has an associated rating that shows how well you know it, depending on the error-rate you had during training. When training, you can choose to use these ratings to ponder the frequency each word will be trained, during a session.
The training itself happens in a nice, cruft-free window. You can even toggle a black background so that you won’t be distracted while training. Obviously, you can train your vocabulary both ways or only train one language.
All in all, UniLingua is a well-done little application that is well worth its price. If you ever need to train your French vocabulary again, give it a try ;)
Oh, and it does exceptionally well in conjunction with SpamDictionary.
If I need a test in English is not the question! :) ↩︎