Learning Dos mundos: En breve Vocabulary
My wife and I are both Spanish students. She is now (this page was written in 2002) taking Spanish 102 for transfer credit, and while I took two years of Spanish in college long ago I never acquired proficiency, and am taking Conversational Spanish. We both use the Dos mundos text, so I started looking for software that would help both of us learn new vocabulary. The result of my search was Vocatude (now called Voca), a former commercial product recently released by its author as freeware. The program has more features than I care to list. Just download it. Tucows has it. My only complaint is that I had to breakdown and actually read some of the extensive help files to figure out how to use it.
Sue, my better half, has heroically entered all vocabulary words and phrases (up to Chapter 8 so far) from the text, with reference to chapter and page number. Download the list, unzip to a folder, and use the word lists with Vocatude. By the end of this semester, all chapters should be available.
I didn't like the default setting in Vocatude, but fortunately the software is quite flexible. For those interested, here's how I setup Vocatude:
Once installed, Vocatude comes up empty, without a word list. If you click on File, then Open you can load in a word list. Unless you unzipped the word lists into your "My Documents" folder, you will need to change directories. There are also some sample word lists in the Vocatude folder.
Click on Edit, Options, Exercises, then set "Required score" to 1 (from 3) and in the "Quick" field change the 2 to 1. Why? Well, there are words in the lists I already know, and I'm sure that is true for just about everyone (¿No?). When a known word comes up during an exercise, I click "Yes" to indicate that I know it, and never want to see it again. Otherwise, with the default settings, known words would keep appearing, which I found annoying. You might also want to click on the Other option and select, "Automatically open most recently used word list at start-up." To be tested on all words, Spanish to English and English to Spanish, click on Test, then Start Exercise or Start Exam. For more options, you'll have to breakdown and read the help files.
The important thing to realize is that in Vocatude you have to select rows of words before you can do anything with them. Under Edit you can Select All, or to select a range, click on the first line on the far left gray button to highlight the line. Then scroll down to the last line, hold the Shift key down, and then click on the button on the left side to highlight all the words in the range. You can then go up to Test on the top menu (or better, right click on a gray button) and change various options before doing an exercise or taking an exam. To work with a portion of the word list only, you might want to sort before selecting a range. You will also need to Select All, select Test, then Turn Words Off: Both Directions, before you can select a range of words. For example, to review only verbs, sort by clicking Part of Speech at the top, Select All and Turn Words Off: Both Directions, then select only the verbs before going to Test and selecting Set for Quick Exercise, in whatever direction you want before starting an exercise or exam.
During an exercise when you see, "Did you know the correct answer?" think instead, "Do you never want to see this word again?" If you immediately know the word or phrase cold, without the slightest hesitation or conscious effort at recall, then you truly know the word and don't need to see it again, so click on "Yes." Otherwise click on "No" even if you managed to dredge up the correct answer from somewhere in memory. A word that is memorized won't stick around much longer than the next exam (been there, done that). If you want to speak or understand a language you must acquire vocabulary, which is very different from memorizing vocabulary just so you can get an A+ in Spanish class. You don't really know a word until its meaning is automatically available to you the instant you hear or see it, just as English is. You can use Vocatude to help you learn (memorize) Spanish vocabulary for tests, or to acquire vocabulary, do well on tests, and actually add to your ability to speak and understand Spanish. I spent 30 years trying to learn Spanish with little payoff for the effort expended because I didn't understand the difference between learning language (an academic process) and acquiring language (a largely natural process).