Japanese Vocabulary Trainer V2.1
Michael Nagy 2007
Program Description:
The Vocabulary Trainer holds Japanese words in Excel Worksheets. Each Lesson that can contain up to 500 words (I recommend 20 words per lesson), is stored in one Worksheet named after the lessons name. One Workbook can hold up to 256 Worksheets by limitation of Excel itself. Five Worksheets are reserved for Program Control, so you can keep up to 125,500 words to learn.
The Vocabulary Trainer can ask words:
a. from English to Kanji, Kana and Romaji
b. from Kanji to English, Kana and Romaji
c. from Kana to English and Kanji
The user can decide how many questions he/she wants per session and how many tries one has before the Program gives the correct answer and if you need to spell out the whole word or just parts of it.
After the question/answer session the program gives detailed results of the success of the student. Answers are counted as right, wrong or cheated. An answer is considered cheated if the correct answer was given by the program or was looked up using the vocabulary card function during the question/answer session.
The program keeps record of wrong and right answers for each word asked in the lesson statistics. The student can find the words he/she needs to look at again to memorize.
Lessons can be created and altered in the Lesson Editor.
The user can change lessons quickly and easily since all lessons are kept in the same workbook as the program.
There is also a Vocabulary Card Browser to look through a lessons words to help memorize them.
In the Lesson Editor each word can be assigned a freely chosen tag to find specific words for extra training, like verbs, adjectives etc.
Planned future features:
- Search words that have a low score in the statistics to retrain.
- Clear statistics for single lesson or all lessons.
- Import / export lessons.
- Error handling
- Dictionary function
Program requirements:
Windows 95, Me, 2000, NT, XP and Excel 97 to 2003.
At least 1.4 MB free space on the HDD.
Japanese Language support installed.
Excel security settings set to allow running Macros.
Program installation: just drop .xls file anywhere you want it
Program start: double click the excel file icon or open the file in a running session of Excel. Allow Macros!
Menu guide:
Main menu after startup:
Click the tabs to change submenus (Train Words, Manage Lessons, Statistics)
The currently active lesson is shown in the upper right hand corner of the menu.
If you click the buttons in the Train Words menu you’ll first get the Change Parameters window:
Enter the number of questions in the larger field. It is preset with three times the amount of words in the lesson. The program tries to ask every word three times in a random order.
In the smaller field enter the number of tries allowed before the program gives you the right answer (in case of misspell). It has a default value of 3 tries.
If the checkmark for “Strict Check” is set the programs wants an exact match of the correct answer found in the lesson. If the checkmark is NOT set it is enough to give only a part of the answer. This is to speed up answering in case you know the word. Don’t use it to cheat!
After changing or just accepting the default values click the “GO!” button.
The question Window will then pop up:
It looks like this for Kana and English questions:
It looks like this for Kanji questions:
In the top left hand corner it shows the number of the question and how many questions there are for the current session.
The top right hand cornet shows in what way the answer is expected to be given.
The main window shows the question.
The “Card” button allows you to open the Vocabulary Card of the current word asked:
It will look like this:
you go back to the question by clicking the “Exit” button on the Vocabulary Card.
The “Back” and “Next” buttons are not doing anything while in a question/answer session. They can still be clicked, though…
If you use the “Card” button your answer will be counted as cheated.
After clicking the exit button we are back at the question window.
Give your answer in the Field marked “Your Answer:”
The fields on the bottom show the response from the program to your answer and the count of tries you had.
After three wrong answers the program gives you the correct answer in the “Your Answer:” field. If you press Enter it will respond with “Your Answer was CORRECT” but it will count the answer as cheated, because the correct answer didn’t come from you…
A question/answer session can always be interrupted by clicking the “Exit” button.
If you answered at least two questions you’ll get a results message. If you didn’t answer any questions the window will just close and bring you back to the menu.
Example of the Results Message
Click “OK” to go back to the menu.
Click the “Manage Lessons” tab and the menu will look like this:
To change the lesson you want to train click the “Change” button.
You’ll get a window to choose the new lesson that looks like this:
The lessons to choose from may look different from this picture. Depending on what lessons you have created or that came with the program.
You can click “Exit” if you don’t want to change the lesson or click the “GO!” button to change the lesson.
The new lesson is now loaded. It is confirmed by the name being indicated at the top right hand corner of the menu window.
You can edit an existing lesson by clicking the “Edit” button.
The Choose… Window will then open:
As before, choose the lesson to edit. This will not alter the lesson currently loaded. If you choose the lesson currently loaded, you’ll have to reload it after editing to see the changes in the question/answer session.
After choosing the lesson the
Input Lesson Data… Window will open:
it is by default set to the last word in the lesson.
To add a new word just click “Next” and a new word will be added at the end of the list.
To confirm your changes you HAVE TO click “Previous” or “Next”, then your changes will be saved in the Worksheet.
If you didn’t enter new data the new and empty entry in the list will be discarded when clicking the “Exit” button.
The “Exit” button closes the Editor.
Click the “Create New” button to create a new lesson.
When clicked the following window will appear:
Type the name for your new lesson. Make sure the name is unique to all the already existing lessons!
You can click “Exit” in case you don’t want to create a new lesson.
If you settled on the name of the new lesson click “GO!”
That opens the Editor Window:
The same rules apply as for editing a lesson.
You have to enter at least one record of data to make the new lesson work.
Empty lessons cause problems later on!
So before you create a new lesson be sure you have some words for it!
Back at the Menu at Tagged Content click the “Find and Learn” button.
A small window appears telling you where it is searching for tagged words.
After the search for tags is done this window appears:
Here you can choose the tag you want to find words for.
After you click “GO!” you will find that the current lesson is now “Results”
If you click the “Browse” button you can browse the found words or you can go to the “Train Words” menu und start a question/anser session on the tagged words.
The “Browse” button shows the Vocabulary Card just like with the question/answer session windows “Card” button. Just this time the “Back” and “Next” buttons let you go back and forth between the words in the lesson.
You can end the Vocabulary Card window by clicking the “Exit” button.
The “Statistics” Menu has only one Button so far:
“Get Statistics for Lesson” lets you find how you did on the words of one lesson.
When you click the button you see the Coose.. window again.
After choosing a lesson that you already trained on you’ll get a window like this after clicking the “GO!” button:
For more information please contact the author via email
Michael Nagy 10-18-2007