Vocabulary Training Application

Screenshot of vocabulary listing Screenshot of fullscreen training Screenshot of pronunciation analysis

Purpose

The knowledge of a foreign language consists of several parts that can not be learned independently: grammar, pronunciation, vocabulary and others. Whereas the first has to be learned interactively lead by a tutor or teacher to be efficient, e.g. by taking part in language training courses offered by a university or language school, vocabularies and their pronunciation can in part be learned autonomously. Language training therefore should cover all this parts through different means of practice material and support: dialogs simulating every-day situations that appear in real life, the interactive construction of sentences to practice grammar, "Listen and repeat" exercises to train understanding and pronunciation, vocabulary drills for memorizing. An "automatic teaching program" may appear inferior to a human language teacher, but it does have some potential advantages: it can be used an unlimited amount of time and students get less embarrassed than while in a classroom. Although there are various free language training programs available, there is a lack of systems that use speech technology.

Compilation

You need reasonable new packages to compile the program:

./configure && make && make install should do the job (at least on i386/amd64). It should compile without problems on a current Debian/Ubuntu, SuSE 9.x may need a newer gtkmm version than provided by Novell.

Use --enable-debug to get more elaborate debug messages.

To use the festival wrapper, enter the program path to festivalwrap in Preferences-Synthesis Settings and use one of the installed voices as parameter, e.g.
  english -- /usr/local/bin/festivalwrap -- voice_kal_diphone

The halifax wrapper has to be customized to the halifax and mbrola program locations. The first parameter determines the sex, the second the requested voice.

This program should also compile on Win32/mingw, though a little patience may be required. Support for evaluation is not ported to amd64 yet and is thus not included in the distribution at the moment.

Download

Vocabtrain 0.2. This is released under GNU GPL.

Vocabtrain 0.2 Windows Installer. Has NO working synthesis support.