If you ever tried to learn any foreign language, then you probably have dealt with flashcards -- the ones that have a word in one language on one side, and in another language on the other side. You randomly pick the card, look at the word, think of translation, and then look at the other side to check if you were right or wrong. If you never tried them, let me assure you that it is the best way of learning foreign vocabulary (provided you do it regularly and intensively).

However, there are some obvious problems with them -- they take a lot of space (especially if you are really into it or are learning more than one language) and they can easily get damaged or lost. So I have developed a program which you can use instead. It is about 140 KB so it nicely fits onto a floppy. The data files for it are plain ASCII files so they will not occupy too much space either.

The program is not quite finished yet. I am updating the code from time to time, and thus any comments, suggestions or critique will be more than welcome! Just email me at robert@jhu.edu.

The program allows you to have as many as 100 ASCII data files (called "vocab00.txt", "vocab01.txt", etc...). You can store an 'infinite' number of words in each of them (as many as your system allows to). It allows to run a quiz in both directions -- from one language into another and back, counting timing of a quiz and a number of words checked. It also creates a special Guide to vocabulary files, which also counts a number of words in the vocabulary files.

You can download: the code; 18 zipped data files and a guide to them with 1,569 entries (to accompnay "Puntos de Partida" textbook from McGraw Hill Publishers. Watch out -- there are some typos there!!!); another 12 files (to accompany "Fuentes" from Houghton Mifflin Company); and finally zipped program itself.

If you intend to compile the code yourself, be aware that different compilers may compile differently. I used Borland C++ 4.52.
 

Main Menu:
Guide File:
Vocabulary File:
Starting a quiz:
Ending a quiz: