Teachionary will teach sets of words to you, carefully, at your own pace, and with infinite patience. It will give you the right mix of variety and of repetition, the right mix of passive and active listening, and will lead you quickly through much of the basic vocabulary of the target language. It will pronounce everything for you clearly, with completely native pronunciation, instantly repeating itself on demand, constantly thinking about what to focus on next, and always keeping close track of your progress. It may be the most efficient vocabulary training tool in the world.
But through Teachionary, vocabulary training is a high speed experience. You can sit back, open your mind, and the words will come sailing in, register themselves, and make sure that you will recognize them in the future, at a rate that will surprise you when in the end you realize how much you have learned!
Teachionary provides positive, but not negative (corrective), training on pronunciation, by providing native-speaker recordings which you can use as a model, but without correcting your pronunciation.
Teachionary will not have a conversation with you and teach you about turn-taking or politeness or the rules of normal social interaction in your target language; and you shouldn't assume that any of those things are done in the way you're used to, in the language you're learning.
Teachionary is what it is, and it only provides part of a complete language learning experience. Those other crucial elements of the whole are very important. So you must take responsibility for your own learning by making sure you get them, from other sources (primarily teachers rather than books, since teachers are much more able to help you learn to use the nuances of grammar and pronunciation in actual conversation).
In short, Teachionary is simply a tool to be used as one part of a more complete language learning experience. It doesn't do everything, but it helps you with a big and important part of it!
A "cube" set of sentences is one similar to this:
Listening to a set of "cube" sentences, one is required to auditorily segment the elements, one from another. And when one can identify which sentence has been said in a given prompt, then one must have acquired some familiarity with the contrast between each of the pairs of elements. Although this does not provide speech in a conversational context, per se, Teachionary with cube sentence sets does provide everything needed for, and requires the learner to carry out, a perceptual analysis of the utterance into morphemes and a grammatical synthesis of the parts into a meaningful sentence., is required by doing Teachionary training on cube sentence sets.
Teachionary leads you one after the other through all the vocabulary domains available. Having picked one word set, Teachionary starts by putting you into Play Mode. In Play Mode you can click on a different button for each word in the set, and listen to them being played out, so you can hear the words as spoken by a native. After you quickly play them out a few times, you will click over into Guess Mode. In Guess Mode, the computer selects a word for you randomly, and you click on a button to guess which word it spoke. After you guess a word correctly a few times, it will stop asking you for that one -- so that you can concentrate more on the words that are harder. Very soon you will know all of them!
Teachionary is the optimal way to learn basic vocabulary items in the language you are learning. It's fast and it's fun. Try it!
Potential technical problems and solutions are described here.
Copyright © 1997-2004 Sprex, Inc. All rights reserved.
Modified: August 11, 2004