Spanish, English, Chinese, Korean
Flash Cards, MP3 Creator, Student Testing
This program is free. Bookmark now. Works on Windows (95, 98, 2000, Me, Vista) and Linux if you use Wine and place MSVBVM60.DLL in system32 folder. OSx users of Wine:you may need to switch on "winxp" "vb6run" "vb5run" "unifont" and "l3codecx". Computers with non-european character sets may need to use control panel to switch to the English language pack.
spanish1000.exe 3.5 MB. Contains the program and the 1,000 most common Spanish words.
spanish.exe 30 MB. Big file! Same as above but contains 9,100 Spanish sound files.
english.exe 27 MB. This installs the 8,000 English words spoken in my southern english accent. Install this if you want to use the program with your MP3 player OR you know Spanish and want to learn english OR you want to hear the English words with the Spanish words so you can listen without looking at the computer screen. Hint: I was able to learn Spanish much faster without the English sound files and just looking at the computer screen, especially for learning to read Spanish.
Select the Unicode version of the program to see the chinese and korean words correctly. They appear as gibberish in the regular wordsgalore program above. Chinese Words 30 MB Has maybe 15% errors in the words.
Korean Words 30 MB Has about 10% errors in the words.
The English and Spanish words have been used to make a Hangman game
Where is this program deficient? The word lists are too big and not broken down into categories like numbers and you can't make your own word lists unless you edit the txt files in the language folder and save them as a different txt file (this is for the computer savy). There are not yet sentences and phrases.
Where to go next? Verb conjugations in Spanish are complex, creating 4 times more "words" (distinct spellings) compared to English. English uses seperate words to determine "who" (he/she/it) and often "when" (past/present/future) a verb action is taking place, but Spanish changes the verb ENDING or the WHOLE verb. Determining he/she/it and past/present/future has a lot of different possible combinations which is why there are about 30 different ways to change the ending of Spanish verbs. Luckily, there is a standardized way to get the 30-ish different endings, depending on if the verb ends in -ir, -ar, or -er (so you have over a 100 things to learn until it is IMMEDIATE instinct). But 50ish common verbs do not follow the rules, which adds a lot more to what you have to learn. All this probably makes Spanish a more fluid language. After you're completely bored with the program and have learned 2000 to 5000 words, find a Spanish-English bilingual Bible. I recommend this one because the phrases are translated from the King James Version down to every comma and semi-colon with fear-of-God exactness. It has the verses side-by-side like this. It is the Reina Valera translation of the KJV which has 1960, 1995 and Antigua versions which are all good, but 1995 should have the most modern Spanish. The Gideons also publish a Bible like this. You can go to www.biblegateway.org which has all Bible translations, but the texts are not side-by-side. After 300 pages of slow, brain-racking study, and writing down clues (view it as a puzzle to figure out), you should have an intuitive feel for verb conjugations and the use of "de", "la", "que", "para", etc. You can then start using ReadPlease Plus or TextAloud (which allows creating mp3 files, but requires purchase after 30 days) to READ ALOUD Spanish text as it HIGHLIGHTS each word. See the bottom of that page for the Spanish voice. Using ReadPlease, you will see rapid progress. So you copy and paste words from BibleGateway to a text-editor, remove the numbers, and copy and paste to ReadPlease Plus. You keep your King James Version Bible in your lap to follow for the translation. Here is Exodus. Switch back to WordsGalore for a while if it gets boring. After 1/3 of the Bible using ReadPlease, you will be able to listen at normal speed and follow almost everything. But you will be only 1/5 of the way to being able to listen to everyday Spanish at normal speed. Once you've listened to the whole Bible and learned all of WordsGalore, you'll be able to read and listen really well and speak so-so. It's not easy. This process will take 2 years working 1.5 hours per day. Someone with a good memory and young can do it in a year. DVD's with Spanish subtitles help once you've finished listening to 1/2 bible and other books. It takes a lot of work, but if you can find electronic version of books in Spanish that you already have in English, you can listen to the spanish while following in either spanish on the screen, or english in the book. I found Stephen Hawking's books (cosmology for the layman) in Spanish online at scribd.
Portable MP3 players: The program's function to create mp3 files for your portable mp3 player is not useful unless you also download the English and Spanish. Otherwise, you just hear Spanish words without the English translation.
