Vocabulary Driller: A Desktop Application

a fun way to learn

Click here to view application

Vocabulary Driller is in need of a major update, and I have plans to turn it into a full blown web application. Just not sure yet if I need Flash for the entire interface or not. I also need to tranform the desktop version into an AIR application. But until then, you can still check the application here.

When studying a foreign language, which is something of an obsession with me, there is that moment during the process of acquiring new vocabulary–before the level is achieved when one can comfortably read books–when it seems that to every new word learned five old words disappear from my brain. So over the years I found necessary to create a system of little games I could play to review the words and keep them fresh in my mind.

This originally started as a series of independent applications, quizzes mostly, loading data from static XML files; there were games to help review words and other games to help review sentence structure, or verb conjugation and things like that. Soon I had something like twenty applications loading up to three hundred XML files. From the need for better organization and optimization, the Vocabulary Driller was born.

I use it to collect words, sentences, and grammatical rules from all the different languages I may be currently reviewing, and also to collect and list all the various types of quiz games I develop.

The words and lists can also be managed (edited, deleted, added, joined, renamed) as well as added to highlight lists where I collect all the main words I want to memorize first. The ones I get wrong while playing the quizzes can be collected in Error lists which can be reviewed separately.

But one of the best features in the application is the Weekly Quiz Creator. In this, you can select a number of lists of words/sentences/grammar exercises, and the application will divide all the items collected, creating a list of items to be reviewed for each day of the week (or however many days you’d like). This way you can focus on a variety of topics and still maintain the number of words reviewed each day to a comfortable and achievable size.

The Vocabulary Driller is developed to play as a projector (locally) and not as a web application, but it is optimized to work just as well online.

The stored MySQL data allows for UTF8 special characters, which comes in handy for the German words, and Italian, French…