Quick Overview
The best way to familiarize yourself with the program is to read through the "Help" menu. It's a quick read, includes screen shots for greater clarity, and includes an "Index" screen to let you quickly navigate to the section you want. For those of you who can't bring yourselves to read Help menus, some "Quick Directions" are further below.
Capabilities of the program include:
- Loading pre-made cards from the database by University of Michigan course and/or by part of speech and/or by meaning category
- Creating custom cards individually, or loading them from a word list (so that, in particular, you could use this program to study not only German and other languages, but any other information in flash card form)
- Saving your work
- Reviewing cards purely visually, or by typing in translations
- Shuffling cards; choosing which side of the cards faces up
- Choosing between textual prompts and audio prompts
- Getting hints that show you a portion of the translation
- A cool background selector (just for fun)
Quick Directions
1) Load flash cards into the Main Deck by choosing one of the following:
Load cards from the database... [e.g. German 101, Vorsprung Kapitel 4]
Create your own custom cards... [individually or using a Word List]
Load cards from saved session... [to return to cards you saved previously]
2) Now go through the cards in the Main Deck one at a time using the arrow keys:
- Use the Up Arrow Key to flip the card over, and decide whether or not you are familiar with the vocab on the card.
- If the card is immediately familiar, use the Left Arrow Key to move it to the "Easy Deck" (top left).
- If you decide that you need to keep studying this card, use the Right Arrow Key to move it to the "Hard Deck" (top right).
- Use the Down Arrow Key once or repeatedly as an "Undo" button to if you accidentally send one or more cards to the wrong deck
3) When you get to the end of the Main Deck, the Easy Deck should contain all the cards that you already know, and the Hard Deck should contain all the cards that you still need to review. In the space where the Main Deck used to be, you can choose which deck you would like to bring back to the Main Deck to review; normally, you would choose the Hard Deck.
4) More details on the options available to you are in the Help menu, but here is a very quick summary:
- the flags to the right of the Main Deck allow you to choose which side of the cards faces up, i.e. which language faces up
- the buttons to the left of the Main Deck allow you (in order from top to bottom) to:
- shuffle the Main Deck
- get "hints" for any card
- open a keyboard field so you can type in your responses if you like
- save your work
- the Options menu allows you to:
- remove cards from a specified deck (e.g. the Easy Deck, once you've decided you don't need to study those cards anymore)
- choose Audio prompts rather than textual prompts
- select your favorite background for the program
Source of Franz Marc background image: http://commons.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Franz_Marc_020.jpg
Source of all other background images: Photographs taken by Hartmut Rastalsky
