Dictionaries & Language

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I n t e r m e d i a t e - l e v e l L a n g u a g e T u t o r ----------------------------------------------------------------- User's Guide To Operation Intermediate-level Language Tutor -- Version 1.01 Copyright (c) 1991 by Brian Francis Redman, all rights reserved. The following files should be included with your copy of the distribution disk: ILT.DOC ........... Program documentation ILT.EXE.............Front menu for all programs ILTRD.EXE.......... Quiz program ILTBLD.EXE......... Build quizzes program ILTEDT.EXE......... Edit quizzes program ILTSRCH.EXE.........Check for duplicate entries INTERA.DAT......... Quiz file A INTERB.DAT......... Quiz file B INTERC.DAT......... Quiz file C INTERD.DAT......... Quiz file D INTERE.DAT..........Quiz file E INTERF.DAT..........Quiz file F INTERG.DAT..........Quiz file G Anyone not charging an unreasonably high "duplication" fee (beyond whatever is the current norm for such fees), may freely copy and share exact duplicates of The Intermediate-level Language Tutor. All program and documentation files must be distributed together and unmodified. Intermediate-level Language Tutor Warranty There is no warranty of any kind associated with ILT. You, the user, are advised to experiment and become familiar with all of the programs before relying on them. The correct meanings of the words in the quiz files is not guaranteed, however I have striven for accuracy as I too use this program. The meanings of the words in the quizzes were obtained from various Spanish-English dictionaries. Be aware that many of the words have other meanings beyond what is indicated in the quiz files. Table Of Contents Line Quick Start..............................................77 Introduction ........................................... 90 System Requirements ...............................110 ILT -- front menu program...............................123 ILTRD -- the quiz program...............................133 ILTBLD -- build quizzes program.........................182 ILTEDT -- edit quizzes program..........................253 ILTSRCH -- search for duplicates........................281 For Further Help........................................310 History.................................................323 A Final Note............................................335 Quick Start If you don't enjoy reading documentation and just want to get started, my guess is that you will be able to run the ILTRD program quite easily. In fact I recommend that you go ahead and run the ILTRD program and come back and read the documentation later. Remember two things: 1) enter ILTRD to begin 2) when asked for a letter A through Z, enter "A", "B", "C", "D", "E", "F", OR "G". ^^ Introduction to the Programs The present version of these programs (except ILTSRCH.EXE), version 1.01, was written in the BASIC programming language, using the SPECTRA Power BASIC compiler. ILTSRCH was written in the BASIC programming language but using the Microsoft Quick Basic compiler (v 4.5). SPECTRA is a registered trademark of SPECTRA Publishing. Microsoft is a registered trademark of Microsoft Corporation. There are four programs. ILTRD is the quiz program. It will give you a 100 question, multiple choice quiz on the meanings of the words. ILTBLD allows you to create your own quiz files in Spanish, French, Italian, German, or English. ILTEDT allows you to modify individual entries in the quiz files. ILTSRCH lets you determine beforehand if a candidate word already exists in the quiz files. This lets you avoid duplication of entries. System Requirements To run, The Intermediate-level Language Tutor requires the following "standard" equipment: a computer ............. IBM PC/XT/AT or somewhat compatible an operating system .... MS-DOS or PC-DOS 2.0 or later a monitor .............. Monochrome, Color, Enhanced memory ................. ???k free (unsure) disk drives ............ virtually anything ======= ILT ======= Enter ILT to start the program. ILT serves as a front menu for the other programs. It is self- explanatory and thus I do not feel I need to explain it here. In the ILT program, you can press the F1 function key if you need help. ========= ILTRD ========= Enter ILTRD to start the program. You will be greeted with a title page. Press any key to move on to the main program. You will be requested to enter a letter A-Z. These letters are linked to the quiz files INTERA.DAT, INTERB.DAT, INTERC.DAT ..... INTERY.DAT, INTERZ.DAT. Not all of these "DAT" files are initially present. For example, if you were to enter "S" and there were no corresponding INTERS.DAT file then you would get an error message saying that that file is not available. File selections A, B, C, D, E should be available. Beyond that (as of this writing) I do not know what else will be available. You will also see in the top left of the screen (after you have passed the title page) the following line: F1 = Functions. Pressing the F1 key will toggle a list of available functions. Now suppose you have entered the letter "A". The program will then read in the data from INTERA.DAT and randomly "shuffle" the order of the quiz questions. Thus, each time you take quiz "A" the order of the questions will be random. Besides this, ILTRD additionally "shuffles" the order of the responses for each quiz question. Thus you could not have the situation where you "knew" that the correct answer for "la mesa" was always "c". The program is set up to give you a 100 question quiz and then end. I set it up this way because I thought it would thereby be less time consuming for the user. I thought the program would be better as a sort of 10-minutes-a-day tool for learning. I did not want the program to be overused for a week and then collect dust. My hope is that you will use this program to slowly and steadily improve your understanding of whatever language you are studying. You can of course rerun the program if you decide you want to "cram." Pressing either the F5 key or the ESC key will let you exit the program at any time. Pressing F2 will give you online help with the program. Pressing F3 will print a list of the words in the current quiz set along with their correct meanings. You can use this list as a study guide to the words for either yourself or your students. Pressing F4 will print a quiz based on the current quiz set. When you press F4 you will have the option of changing (a) how many quizzes are printed and (b) the number of questions per quiz. Quiz questions are generated randomly, yet each individual quiz is the same as the others. In other words, for a 10-question quiz the 10 quiz words will be selected at random from the current set and printed repeatedly for all quizzes. ========== ILTBLD ========== Enter ILTBLD to start the program. You will be greeted with a title page. Press any key to continue. Select the first letter of whatever language you will be using. For example, "S" for Spanish, "F" for French, etcetera. Files A through G are filled (100 records) and cannot be added to. I recommend that you leave them as they are. If you find you need to modify files A - G, you will need to run the ILTEDT program (see below) to alter the contents. File letters H - Z are available for building extra files. Select whichever quiz set you will be building. ILTBLD will keep track of how many records are in the selected quiz set and will automatically terminate execution when there are 100 records in the current quiz set. Thus, given that there are 26 letters in the alphabet, the maximum number of records you can have would *APPEAR* to be 2600 -- however you can get around this by storing different quiz sets on different files. For example, you could have a disk containing files which you had renamed using the DOS rename command as follows: RENAME INTERA.DAT FRENCHA.DAT Then, when you wanted to use these files, you could copy them to a separate directory using the DOS copy command as follows: COPY FRENCHA.DAT C:\WORKAREA Next, you would have to rename the file to its original name. For example: RENAME FRENCHA.DAT INTERA.DAT Finally, after storing any ".DAT" files that are in whatever directory you are using to run the ILT programs, you would transfer the renamed FRENCHA.DAT file to the ILT directory as follows: COPY C:\WORKAREA\INTERA.DAT C:\ILT\INTERA.DAT If the preceding has confused you i'm sorry. Depending on how many people use this program I may release future versions that are easier to work with. You can of course contact me via electronic mail at either Compuserve or Genie if you get stuck or have questions. Later on in this documentation i'll leave my E-mail addresses for those who wish to contact me. At any rate, you will be prompted for a word, then for the meaning of that word. Then you will be asked to supply four false meanings to the word. To me, this was the hardest part of this program. You will need to come up with four words that 1)do not match *any* of the meanings of the foreign language word 2)are of the same type as the foreign language word (e.g. noun, verb, etc.) 3)are somewhat tricky -- in other words not obviously a false answer. There is a F3 option which will give you a randomly generated bunching of letters that to me served as sort of an inkblot to suggest possible false answers; still, it is going to take effort on your part to arrive at four good false answers. I found that paging through a good-sized dictionary was also a help to finding some good false answers. If you add just 5 or so words a day to the quiz files, you will gradually build a powerful vocabulary. If you make a mistake while entering a word, you can delete a part of or all of the entry by pressing the left arrow key (not the cursor left key) which is probably located to the right of the "90-=\" keys on your keyboard. If you have already entered the word and wish to change it, you will need to use the ILTEDT program (see below). F4 will toggle a list of keys which are associated with the special alphabet characters of the particular language you are working with. For example, in Spanish you will see 1 - á 2 - é 3 - í 4 - ó 5 - ú 6 - ñ These keys refer to the number keys 1, 2, 3, 4, ..., etc. (Don't confuse them with the function keys F1, F2, ..., etc.) So, if you wanted to enter the word "señor" you would press these keys: S E 6 O R and "señor" would be echoed to the screen. As always, pressing the F5 or "ESC" keys will let you quit the program. The F1 key will toggle a brief help line while F2 will give you more detailed help. ========== ILTEDT ========== Enter ILTEDT to begin. You will be greeted with a title screen. Press any key to continue. ILTEDT allows you to change anything you have entered in a record. This is useful if you find you have made an error in any of the record entries. Select the language (French, German, Spanish, or Italian) then the letter of the quiz set. Use the "Page Up" and "Page Down" keys to page through the records in increments of ten. Use the up and down cursor keys to page through the records in increments of 1. Pressing the "Enter" or "Carriage Return" selects the current record for editing. You will be prompted for the number of the field to edit. Press the number key 1 through 6 and begin editing. F1 will toggle a line showing a hint for what the function keys F1 through F5 do. F2 will toggle a list of language keys for the current set. The numbers listed correspond to the numeric keys at the top of the keyboard and not to the function keys. F3 will list what keys control the program. For example, as already mentioned the up and down cursor keys are used to control paging through the records in increments of 1. F4 will open an online help window. F5 or the "ESC" key let you quit the program. =========== ILTSRCH =========== Enter ILTSRCH to begin. The program will display that it is working. After about a minute it will ask you to select a language. Then you will be prompted for a search item. ILTSRCH was written by me at the last moment when I saw that after awhile it wasn't easy to remember if I had already entered a word into the record sets or not. For example, I had entered "el regazo" but could not remember having done so. Rather than re-enter the word I ran ILTSRCH and when prompted for a search item I entered "el regazo" The program found a match and so I knew not to enter "el regazo" into the record sets twice. If you enter a word such as a noun, be sure to include the definite article if that is how you are storing the words. For example, if I had entered just "regazo" when prompted for a search string no match would have been found. On the other hand, if I had entered "el r" a match would have been found. To quit the program you can press just the enter key alone when prompted for a search item or alternately, F1 will allow you to quit at any time. As stated, ILTSRCH was thrown together at the last minute, while I was in the process of moving. Thus I know that improvements could be made. However I ran out of time and I wanted to get a version of the ILT programs out before I got bogged down in other things. ==================== For Further Help ==================== Let me hear from you! I can be reached by electronic mail at either Compuserve (72567,3145) or Genie (B.REDMAN). I know that improvements can be made to this program, however I have held off because I thought "Suppose I am the only one who winds up using this?" Let me know if you are using ILT, what you do or don't like about it, any problems you have with it, and any ideas you have about what could be added to the program to improve it. =========== History =========== Version 1.0 Released July 1991 Version 1.01 August 1991 Fixed a bug in the ILTBLD program which was allowing more than 100 elements into data files (i.e. files with ".DAT" extension). ================ A Final Note ================ I began to write this program because I wanted to be able to read and enjoy Spanish literature. As of this writing I have recently graduated from Northern Illinois University with a B.A. in Spanish. And the sad thing is that I do not feel that I can read Spanish. I'm not saying that I don't know Spanish, its just that whenever I try to read Spanish literature I am constantly having to stop and look up the meanings of words. And when I say constantly, I mean at least five words every page. This constant stopping to look up the meanings of words is aggravating. Thus, I am still unable to *enjoy* Spanish literature. My hope is that this program will gradually remedy that situation for me and perhaps for you.