Wolfire Games Forums

This is for for students who have/are studying languages.

Any help in filling out a short survey?
I am doing my computing A2 project, and need some market research. So I created a small survey. Any help in doing so would be greatly appreciated.

http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/GPQ76YN

Many thanks all !

A program for assisting the learning of new words would be useful.


Some thoughts:

0) Make EXTRA sure your program supports text and fonts and folder structures with special characters in it. For example, 'Työpöytä' is 'Desktop' in Finnish. 'tweeëntwintich' is 22 in Dutch. And if you're learning Slovak and have to learn the word Invisible, it's written Neviditeľný ...

1) It should be possible to categorize the words. Examples:
Colors. Clothes. Buying groceries. Irregular verbs.

2) It should be possible to choose several categories at once. Examples:
Practice all the words from chapters 1, 2 and 3 for tomorrow's test.

3) Support for spaces in the words. For example, in German and Dutch and Swedish, you have to learn the nouns' gender:
de flas, de brood, het flasje, het broodje

Those are pretty basic and make the program much more useful.

Below are ideas that aren't that basic, and might not be feasible at all.

3) Alternate hint types.
Word in a different language:
BLACK ? ___zwart

Long text:

Fill in the color 'black' in the correct form:

Sam hebt een _____ fiets. -> ___zwarte

Image without text:
████ ? ___zwart

Image with text:
"What color are these shoes?" [IMG] ? ___zwart

Audio file with a button to play it, with or without text.

(I doubt you'll implement all of these, but thought I'd suggest them any way.)

3.5) Unless you're planning on doing the lists yourself, you need to have some tools for making new word lists and adding new words into a database and maybe copying existing words from one group into another.


4) Ability to learn new words from a set few at a time. For example, first you're only asked about five colours. When you know those, you can add five more colors into the set. Then, you can add five MORE colours, etc.
This could be done in several ways, and the implementation probably requires word groups/sets being designed in a specific way.

5. Ability to check words as "learned" so that they don't come up randomly any more, or are more rare. This way you'll end seeing the words you don't know yet more often than those you do know. It could even be made automatic, perhaps on a per-session basis: if you're practicing colors and got "white" and "black" right already, but are having trouble with the spelling of "turquoise" and "ultramarine", then you'll see the words you already knew less often that other words.

As I said, these latter ideas might not be feasible at all. I'm just throwing them around.


This could be a very useful tool. Are you going to release it publicly?