Linguistical 1.0


Category: Education
Price: $0.99 (iTunes)

Description:

Learn to sight read grade-1 braille in an hour, or even grade-2 with a bit more effort, pick up the Japanese phonetic alphabets, or type in your French homework and reel it off 100% in tests the next day.

Linguistical is a language learning tool that was specifically designed for touch interfaces (ie, interfaces which are not convenient for text entry) and for data sets which cannot be conveniently entered (images and foreign alphabets). It works in a similar way to flash cards, except by presenting each item to be learned as a multiple-choice question. If the answer is wrong, the correct answer will be highlighted and the program waits for acknowledgment before continuing with the next.

Once every question has been answered, right or wrong, all those questions which weren't answered correctly are repeated, until the right choice has been given for every one. The student gets a score, with the aim being to get 100% after a few tries. For a simple dictionary, such as the basic grade-1 braille alphabet, this takes 4 or 5 runs, or about half an hour. Repeat once or twice the next day to get the information out of short term memory and into the parts of the brain where you really want it.

Dictionaries can be downloaded from any web page via the built in interface, and at the moment Japanese Hiragana and Katakana character sets are available, as is western braille (grade 1 and 2) and GCSE level Spanish.
The main reason for creating this was to have a vocabulary learning system that can be used while traveling (when suddenly feeling the need to learn yes, no and thankyou in Swahili) or in the otherwise wasted time sitting in a car on the way home from school (full marks in your next vocab test, anyone?).

Using Linguistical is easy, and should be possible without any manuals or effort. On launch you will be presented with a menu offering Dictionaries or Download. You will not have any dictionaries yet, and should select Download. The download page is a web browser, and displays a list of the dictionaries made available by glyph.org.uk. Any of these can be downloaded free of charge by pressing the blue download button next to their name. Alternatively, you can browse to anywhere else on the web to find custom dictionaries created by yourself or others. Once dictionaries are installed they will remain in place and no network access is required to use them. They will appear under the Dictionaries menu. Choose the one you want to learn, and it will present you with a setup page in which you can select the number of questions to be asked and, in the case of more complex dictionaries, the subset of the available data that you are interested in. Generally speaking when you are completely new to a dictionary a test size of 10 will prevent you being overwhelmed. If you have some prior familiarity with the subject try 20 at once instead. You should repeat the test untill you get a 100% run, and repeat it again once the next day to make it stick.

The test itself will display a question in the middle of the screen, and a set of possible answers arranged around it, as in the screenshot. Simply select what you think is the correct answer. If you are wrong, it will show you the one you needed before it continues.

Linguistical



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