| Product: |
Vocabulary Master |
| Date: |
25.08.01 (439 review reads) |
| Rating: |
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Advantages: small, stable, effective
Disadvantages: bad inteface, poor design
If you’ve ever tried to learn a new language at home, you may understand that it isn’t exactly easy. Not if you’re aiming to become very fluent anyway! The ‘Teach Yourself’ packs give you enough knowledge to get by on holiday - some set phrases to memorise and enough knowledge of grammar to form sentences, along with a few words - numbers, days, months, etc, but not much extra.
‘Teach yourself’ is a good starting point, but that's all they are - they give you the knowledge to say ‘I like’, ‘I do not like’ and ‘I would like’ but only a couple of examples of each. ‘I like chocolate’, ‘I do not like tea.’. Once you know how to form those sentences, the rest of the work is up to you. If you want to be able to say ‘I do not like roses’ then you have to learn the word for roses.
Building your vocabulary is hard. I am learning Brazilian Portuguese, and, thrown in at the deep end (meaning personal communication with a Brazilian) I found myself trying to build my vocabulary one word at a time while writing email. That is NOT a good way to do it! At least, not when you have a very small vocabulary and almost every word is new to you.
I found a web site called Transparent.com - they offer 'Word of the day’ - a service where you get emailed a word in your language, a sentence showing it’s usage, and a link to a sound file of a native speaker using it. This is worthwhile as a way to boost your knowledge, but one word a day is hardly fast learning, and so far I have found that most of the words are ones that I already know. I stay subscribed though, just to get the sound files!
Transparent.com also offer a number of language learning products. One of those is the subject of this opinion (see, I am getting to the point!) Vocabulary Master. This is available as a CD with 13 languages on it: Spanish, Fr
ench, German, Italian, Russian, English, Portuguese, Swedish, Dutch, Latin, Irish, Polish and Arabic. The CD retails at $14.95. I got a downloadable copy for free under a special offer. This is identical to the CD copy in every way except you only get one language. I chose Portuguese.
The Portuguese word list I got was most certainly a Brazilian Portuguese one. This is important as the two languages are very different in both spelling and grammar. I don’t know anything about most of the other languages listed, but if there are variations on some of the other languages it may be worth checking to see what version you get with the program. I was certainly surprised to see it was Brazilian Portuguese!
You get 40 categories of words with Vocabulary Master. These are:
Animals, Countries, Kitchen, Office, Sports,
Apparel, Dairy, Languages, Places, Test,
Bathroom, Dessert, Living Room, Professions,
Time, Bedroom, Dining Room, Meals, School,
Travel, Beverages, Family, Meat, Seafood,
Vegetables, Body Parts, Fruit, Months, Seasons,
Verbs, Colours, Grains, Nature, Shapes, Weather,
Continents, House, Numbers, Spices, Weekdays.
The number of words in each category varies. Verbs, for example, has 100 words. Days of the week has, surprise, surprise - seven words!
The program itself is just a flash card system. It shows you the word, you type in the meaning. You can go from your native language to the one you are learning, or the other way around.
There is a colour code system to help you track your progress. Words you don’t know are red words you sort of know are yellow, words you know well are green. All words start off as red. When you get the same word right twice in a row it turns yellow. A further three times, to make five in total, and it turns green. If you get a word wrong even once, it turns red again.
You can set the program to show red words mor
e often than green ones, and choose to have only a certain type of word shown at all - so if you don’t want to be tested on words you know well, don’t let it display green words. Or, if you want to work on a set selection of words - say yellow and green ones to reenforce them, don’t let it display red ones.
The interface is very simple: a ‘flash card’ that looks like a piece of lined paper with a place below the card to enter your words. A display down the right hand side showing how many words are red, yellow and green. Near the text entry box is an option to flip the card (revealing the correct answer), change the language display, or skip the card. Below that is another set of buttons to view the word list, view your progress, or quit the program.
The menu system at the top offers further options, such as calling up the help system and printing or changing the word list.
When you flip the card you hear either a ‘ta da!’ sound, meaning you got the answer right, or a ‘whee-bang’ sound, meaning you got it wrong. If you get two or more right you see a ‘well done!’ message on the left, with a yellow circle containing a number that shows how many you got right in a row. You actually see a ‘well done’ message every time you get something right, but it is rather hard to read - more on that later.
The top right hand corner of the ‘flash card’ has a coloured dot that indicates how well you know the word.
I like this program because it is quite small, can be ran in the background and used for a couple of words at a time and is very stable. It lets you add new words, which is a handy feature, although I don’t use it very often as I haven’t learned all the existing words yet!
I don’t like this program because it can be hard on the eye. The background is a kind of dark blue. The blue that is dark, but at t
he same time very bright. The text labeling the data entry boxes, and also containing the ‘well done’ messages, is bold black. Dark blue and black DO NOT mix! It is possible to read the text, but only if you concentrate very hard and peer at the screen. Design like that is inexcusable and has put me off ever buying their more expensive full language learning packages. This is a great little freebie, and may even be worth $14.95 since it is more than useable, but it is a simple package, one that I could write myself without much thought. The other programs they are selling have many more features, and when their designers make such a simple mistake with their cheaper packages, I worry what they could be doing with the bigger ones!
The helps system is, um, fair. They can’t offer much with this program as it’s so simple to use, and the instructions are good enough, but there isn’t a decent search facility or any context sensitive help so it’s sometimes harder to find the help you need than it should be. Again, a sign that there wasn’t much thought put into the development of this program. Silly really - if this had been great they’d be getting $40 out of me today!
Using the program is simple enough, and, when seeing a Portuguese word and typing in the English equivalent, things are great! Going from English to Portuguese is more annoying though. I have my keyboard set up with Brazilian Portuguese as the default, so I am used to typing accents in the ‘windows’ way in other programs. This can’t cope with it though, and beeps like crazy when I try to type them. It has it’s own little keyboard system that comes up in a pop-up window - you use the mouse to click the keys, This keyboard and works slightly differently to normal. It also appears to be missing many of the common Portuguese accents.
I found this highly irritating, and for a while decided to just fli
p the card without typing in my answer, and answer yes or no when asked if I got it right. This isn’t all that effective as I soon found myself cheating and saying I had the right answer when in reality I had the accent on the wrong letter!
I checked the help file and found that there was a second method for entering accents. Type the letter you want, then hold down the control key and hit ‘up’ or ‘down’ to cycle through the accents. This is better than the pop up keyboard - at least all the letters are there, but it is still very slow, and stops you from achieving a nice rhythm when typing in a foreign language.
There are other niggles too - you can’t press the tab key to cycle between buttons, nor can you press ‘control + whatever’ to operate them. Instead you just hit the letter corresponding to the first letter of the text on the button - n for no, for example. This is fine, I guess, but it isn’t all that intuitive, and you aren’t actually told about this other than in the help file. If there was a clear instruction on the screen it would be OK, but there isn’t. There isn’t any context sensitive help either.
Perhaps I’m complaining too much about usability, but I’m learning a new language here - I don’t want to have to fuss about with the intricacies of a new program as well. The whole presentation of this is amateurish, and, as my first experience of software from Transparent.com, it is off putting. They offered this as a free download for a while - they should have polished it first. It was a chance for them to reach customers and show them how good their software is. If this is the best they can offer in the ‘little things’, then I don’t want to buy any of their other programs!
In itself its OK. If you’re learning a language and want to build your vocabulary it’s worth the price - $14.95, barely
! If you can find it on offer for free (the link seems to have disappeared!) then grab it. It’s small, stable and effective - it does the job. The one thing it doesn’t do, however, is operate as an ambassador for Transparent.com. It’s amateurish. It’s of a quality that I would probably accept from a shareware web site.
I recommend this product to a friend, but not any other Transparent product. I’ve rated four stars because it does the job, and is has helped me learn Portuguese. Really it deserves three and a half, but I can’t give that here, and personally I think it’s better than three - especially as I didn’t pay for it!
The problem is, the design is so bad that it’s made me say ‘even I can do better than that!’ - watch out for a category called ‘Brazilian Portuguese the Thanatoszane way’ when I finish my own flash-card program :-)
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