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Version 3.6
What's so wonderful about Teachionary?!
Learning new languages is important for all of us (especially
Americans --
cached copy).
Teachionary is a fast and effective tool for learning vocabulary. Motivated users can use it to learn hundreds of vocabulary items in a few days.
Teachionary will teach sets of words to you, carefully, at your own pace, and with infinite patience. It will give you the right mix of variety and of repetition, the right mix of passive and active listening, and will lead you quickly through much of the basic vocabulary of the target language. It will pronounce everything for you clearly, with completely native pronunciation, instantly repeating itself on demand, constantly thinking about what to focus on next, and always keeping close track of your progress. It may be the most efficient vocabulary training tool in the world.
The best thing about Teachionary?!
The best thing about Teachionary is GUESS mode.You will see a number of guesses remaining in GUESS mode. If you see "11 to go", for example, that means you have 11 more correct guesses to make before Teachionary is satisfied with your performance on this word set. Guess right, and the count drops by one. Keep working at it until you can declare victory!
But don't start GUESSing before you know anything; you have to use PLAY mode or AUTO mode for a little while -- First! -- until the words have registered a little bit.
What it is
Teachionary is a supplement to a complete language learning curriculum.Teachionary is an efficient and effective vocabulary trainer. Vocabulary training is a very important part of language learning. Usually it is both tedious and endless: tedious if done through normal book- or teacher-based methods, and endless because it involves learning such an incredibly large number of specific facts. Learning just one word means learning a number of specific sounds in that language, which all come together in a particular order to have a particular meaning, which constitutes that particular word, and all those details must be packaged together in your mind into a single intuitive unit. Then this task, complex in itself, must then be done over and over for each of a very long list of words. Humans are remarkably good at this, but it remains the most tedious and painstaking part of language learning.
However, with the assistance of Teachionary, vocabulary training is a high speed experience. You can sit back, open your mind, and the words will come sailing in, register themselves, and make sure that you will recognize them in the future, at a rate that will surprise you when in the end you realize how much you have learned!
What it is not
Teachionary is NOT a complete language learning curriculum, or a translation system (www.foreignwords.com has many language-to-language translations), or a thesaurus, or even a (word-searchable) dictionary.Teachionary only provides a PART of your language learning experience.
Teachionary does not explicitly teach grammar, pronunciation, conversation, or culture. Teachionary focusses on helping you to learn content words. It plays out words (and in some cases, sentences) while either showing you or asking you what they mean, until you have shown that you can pass its tests.
Teachionary provides positive, but not negative (corrective), training on pronunciation, by providing native-speaker recordings which you can use as a model, but without correcting your pronunciation.
Teachionary will not have a conversation with you and teach you about turn-taking or politeness or the rules of normal social interaction in your target language; and you shouldn't assume that any of those things are done in the way you're used to, in the language you're learning.
Teachionary is what it is, and it only provides part of a complete language learning experience. Those other crucial elements of the whole are very important. So... You must take responsibility for your own learning by making sure you get them, from other sources (primarily teachers rather than books, since teachers are much more able to help you learn to use the nuances of grammar and pronunciation in actual conversation).
In short, Teachionary is simply a tool to be used as one part of a more complete language learning experience. It doesn't do everything, but it helps you with a big and important part of it!
What it is becoming
Enhanced versions of Teachionary are now under development which provide elements of grammar training (using Cube Sentences).
Teachionary with Cube Sentences!
Teachionary mostly does not teach putting words together into phrases or sentences where grammar is needed. However, in recent developments -- see the Pashto "cube" sentences for some examples -- we are demonstrating that many points of grammar can be learned with Teachionary playback using appropriately constructed sets of sentences.A "cube" set of sentences is one similar to this:
- I see you.
- You see me.
- I hear you.
- You hear me.
Listening to a set of "cube" sentences, one is required to auditorily segment the elements, one from another. And when one can identify which sentence has been said in a given prompt, then one must have acquired some familiarity with the contrast between each of the pairs of elements. Although this does not provide speech in a conversational context, per se, Teachionary with cube sentence sets does provide everything needed for, and requires the learner to carry out, a perceptual analysis of the utterance into morphemes and a grammatical synthesis of the parts into a meaningful sentence., is required by doing Teachionary training on cube sentence sets.
How it works
Teachionary is structured by vocabulary domains. From fruits to furniture and from vegetables to body parts, vocabulary domains containing five to fifteen basic terms are extremely widespread in language -- and extremely useful to know! Once you learn a reasonable quantity of the basic "Word Sets", you will have mastered much of the most common vocabulary of your target language!Teachionary leads you one after the other through all the vocabulary domains available. Having picked one word set, Teachionary starts by putting you into Play Mode. In Play Mode you can click on a different button for each word in the set, and listen to them being played out, so you can hear the words as spoken by a native. After you quickly play them out a few times, you will click over into Guess Mode. In Guess Mode, the computer selects a word for you randomly, and you click on a button to guess which word it spoke. After you guess a word correctly a few times, it will stop asking you for that one -- so that you can concentrate more on the words that are harder. Very soon you will know all of them!
Teachionary is the optimal way to learn basic vocabulary items in the language you are learning. It's fast and it's fun. Try it!
Learning Styles
If you use Teachionary in GUESS mode, Teachionary keeps track of what you know, and asks you to guess the words that it thinks you need to concentrate on. In this way, you will learn very quickly.Teachionary also helps you learn a great way to learn. Teachionary's style of learning may not be for everyone or for every thing you will want to learn in life, but Teachionary leads you into the process of learning vocabulary using its special self-testing style, and Teachionary really helps you to learn this particular style of learning.
People that know how to use this style of learning can use Teachionary very effectively and efficiently. Why? Because they use GUESS mode to constantly test themselves and improve their knowledge. This is the secret trick to success with Teachionary, and if you take advantage of it, you will learn all kinds of words very quickly.
It's FUN! to do GUESS mode, to show what you've learned, to watch it count down to zero, and when it does, to Win!
Languages Supported
Languages currently available in Teachionary are:- Cantonese (a main Southern dialect of Chinese: Hong Kong, Guangdong Province)
- Czech
- English
- Persian (Farsi, Iranian)
- German
- Hebrew
- Iraqi Arabic
- Japanese
- Korean
- Malayalam (a language of Kerala, India)
- Pashto
- Quebecois (Canadian French)
- Russian
- Spanish
- Tamil (from South India)
- Turkish
- Uzbek
- Urdu (very similar to Hindi, from Pakistan & India)
- Chinese dialects (Mandarin, Wu, Shanghainese, Amoy (Southern Fujian) &c.)
- Portuguese
- Bengali
- Dari (Afghan Farsi)
- Arabic dialects (Modern Standard, Palestinian, Iraqi (Done!) Saudi)
- Korean (Done!)
- Czech (Done!)
- Italian
- Dutch
- Vietnamese
- Thai
- Tajik
- Catalan
- Marathi
- Malayalam (Done!)
- Tagalog
- Castilian Spanish
More information
Teachionary versions 3.0+ are JavaScript-based web apps relying on the Howler.js audio API for audio playback, as such it works on lots of browsers and devices. We don't know of devices it doesn't work on so if you have issues please get in touch!Previous versions of Teachionary, 0.0 - 2.3 could be tricky to run, and are now obsolete. They were Java[tm] applets requiring a Java enabled web browser which supports applet audio playback. (If you can get the "Bark!" button in the "An Example" section to work on the web page: http://java.sun.com/docs/books/tutorial/applet/appletsonly/sound.html, then you should be able to use Teachionary!
Recent, Java versions known to work with Teachionary include:
Sun Microsystems Inc.; Java 1.3.1; http://java.sun.com/
Sun Microsystems Inc.; Java 1.3.1_06; http://java.sun.com/
Sun Microsystems Inc.; Java 1.3.1_07; http://java.sun.com/
Sun Microsystems Inc.; Java 1.3.1_09; http://java.sun.com/
Sun Microsystems Inc.; Java 1.3.1_13; http://java.sun.com/
Sun Microsystems Inc.; Java 1.3.1_15; http://java.sun.com/
Sun Microsystems Inc.; Java 1.4.1_02; http://java.sun.com/
Sun Microsystems Inc.; Java 1.4.2_03; http://java.sun.com/
Sun Microsystems Inc.; Java 1.4.2_05; http://java.sun.com/
Sun Microsystems Inc.; Java 1.4.2_06; http://java.sun.com/
Sun Microsystems Inc.; Java 1.5.0; http://java.sun.com/
Sun Microsystems Inc.; Java 1.5.0_01; http://java.sun.com/
Apple Computer, Inc.; Java 1.3.1; http://apple.com/
Apple Computer, Inc.; Java 1.4.1_01; http://apple.com/
Apple Computer, Inc.; Java 1.4.2_03; http://apple.com/
Apple Computer, Inc.; Java 1.4.2_05; http://apple.com/
IBM Corporation; Java 1.4.1; http://www.ibm.com/
Blackdown Java-Linux Team; Java 1.4.1; http://www.blackdown.org/
Blackdown Java-Linux Team; Java 1.4.2-01; http://www.blackdown.org/
Please contact
us to list any other Javas you have Teachionary working on.
Visit www.java.com and click on Download to
install the latest Sun Microsystems Inc. version. For Apple Computers, the
Java is usually already installed and you should be able to use it
(to update it, you can click here). For other
Javas, please
let us know if you need any help or have any suggestions to help others.
Potential technical problems and solutions are described here.