The foreign language vocabulary and spelling test is an online vocabulary book, designed to help beginners and intermediate foreign language learners quickly store, organise and test their new vocabulary.

The built in self-test function allows you to keep testing yourself on the words in your vocabulary book and it also keeps track of which words you get wrong and ensures these are tested more frequently than other words.

The built-in translation function will generate the literal translation of new sentences (using the words in your vocab. book) and this will help you explore and understand how sentences are constructed in your chosen language (sentence construction is also called the grammar).

For languages which you find hard to pronounce, you can construct your own pronunciation guide and easily associate this to new words by associating a pronunciation character (or characters if you prefer) with a combination of foreign letters.

The system is not restricted to standard European letters. All right-to-left languages can be represented, for example Greek and Thai.

Cautionary Note – There’s a lot of data!

The amount of data that this application stores, is much larger than the other applications on this web site. For this reason it is recommended that you request a server based account so that your data is stored permanently on the NavWin server. This will greatly reduce the amount of data being transferred around and mean you get a much faster network response, and a better experience. Your data will also be stored safely and securely, so there is no chance of accidentally losing it if you clear your browser cache, for example! You will know if you are logged in as the message at the top of the screen will be a greeting e.g.

Getting Started

To get going, you should add a new language using the screen shown in the image above. To add words to your language, press the Open button

When you start, everything is empty

When you start, you are given a completely empty system, as shown below.

However is quite easy, to build up several hundred words over a short period of time. For example in 2 to 3 hours it is quite easy to get to the state below with 179 words, classified as verbs, nouns, adjectives etc.

Customise your views

All words are stored in a single large list. However, in order to be able to organise your words you can create word views. A view is a selection of filtered words. Because the view is just a filter, it is possible for a single word to appear in multiple views. The view editor is shown below. When you add a new view, it is added as a child of the selected tree node.

Customise your fields

Words are organised into views by using fields which you create as you go along. E.g. you might create a field called Parts Of Speech and give it some values such as “Noun, Verb, Adverb etc”. You can then create a view which shows all words that are “Verbs” for example.

Customise your pronunciation guide

All people are different. They have different accents, different pronunciation, different ways of reading things and different ways of hearing things. For this reason, you can set up your own pronunciation guide to suite you (or you can choose to use no pronunciation guide, once you really start to get the hang of the language). There are no restrictions on what you create and you can create almost any system you want (either entirely your own or an established system). You can easily build up a hundred pronunciation symbols, so we also include the ability to associate foreign letters (or combinations of foreign letters) with each symbol. This keeps the list short and relevant for new words.

Sentence translation

You can also key in a sentence and ask the system to give you a literal translation using your own vocabulary book. In the example below we have entered a new sentence from our text books.

The translate function matches up words. You can easily add missing words. To add a missing word press Save And Add Word. To edit an existing word you can press Save And Edit Word. Both examples are shown below.

You can also add the entire translation to the sentence by clicking on Add Pronunciation and it will appear with in the sentence pronunciation in a single action. Clicking on Add Pronunciation for Tengo adds the entire pronunciation of the word to the sentence. This can be a big time saver if you are making use of the pronunciation guide system.

Spelling test using spaced repetition algorithm

The spelling test will present your words in a pleasant way for regular, fast testing. The system will keep selecting 10 words from your vocabulary book and test you on them. You will not be able to progress to the next set of words until the first has been learnt.

You can either say you got it wrong, you got it nearly right but you want to be tested again quite soon, or you got it completely right and you do not want to be tested again too soon.

Like many vocabulary recollection systems, this one will test you on your vocabulary using a spaced repetition algorithm using 5 buckets, labelled 0 to 4.

The test algorithm will cycle through the buckets regularly, always testing you on blocks of 10 words in each bucket. You will progress to the next 10 words only once you have gotten them all right.

Words are chosen randomly, with words in lower buckets having a much higher probability of selection than words in the higher buckets.

All new words start off in bucket 0. The goal is to get all words into bucket 4.

If you get a word wrong it is moved into bucket 1 (remember bucket zero is reserved for new words only). Bucket 1 is reserved for incorrect words only. Buckets 2 to 4 are reserved for words you are learning. Over time you would expect most words to appear in bucket 4.

Representing verb tenses using the [ ] bracket system

A lot of Western languages have verb tenses which are variations (regular or irregular) on a root word. In order to group these words together (under the root word) we use a simple mechanism, which is very fast to type using a keyboard. The system will allow you to type in any text between square brackets and this is ignored for translation purposes. For sorting purposes, the first bracket is ignored if it appears at the start of the word. So, for example, you can represent all of the Spanish words for ‘To give’ [dar] as follows.

Word or phrase	Translation
[dar] da	he/she/formal/it gives
[dar] dais	you (plural) give
[dar] damos	we give
[dar] dan	they give
[dar] dar	to give
[dar] das	you give
[dar] doy	I give

Notice also the English pronunciation includes the person also e.g. “she” or “they”. For sorting purposes, this word will be sorted as the string “dar] da” and not “[dar] da”.

You are encouraged to follow this system of encoding as it makes the spelling tests much smoother.

Representing unusual character sets with [] brackets

The square bracket mechanism can also be used with non-European scripts, e.g. Thai. For example

Word or phrase	Translation
[dtarm ruuat_] ตำรวจ	Police
[gaao] เก้า	Nine
[len\] เล่น	To play
[mai\] ไม่	Not
[naarm] น้ำ	Water

This is particularly useful if your main objective is to learn to say the words and not write them