Madabar Vocab is a free application for learning vocabulary. Aside from learning foreign language vocab, it can also be used to learn any set of question and answer pairs, such as countries and their capital cities. So far it has been used with Hebrew, Spanish, and German, but should work fine for any language.
The main things that set Madabar Vocab apart from other flashcard-style programs are:
- custom fields can be added to test you on things like the gender, number, and part-of-speech associated with a word
- a very flexible quiz system allowing you to test yourself on various vocab aspects
- designed to cope with diverse languages and special characters
The application consists of two main parts: the vocab-list editor and the quiz generator.
The vocab-list editor allows items to be entered into a table. Typically you have the foreign word in the first column, the translation in the second column, and subsequent columns can be used to signify aspects of the word such as gender or number.
The quiz generator creates quizzes based on your vocab lists. The different styles of quiz include: multiple-choice, entering the word directly or flashcard self-testing.
The quiz settings are very flexible so you can choose things like how many multiple choice answers are displayed, and what supplementary fields (gender, etc.) are included in the quiz.You can also choose any column for the question and any column for the answer. This lets you learn translating to and from a language, for example.
Madabar Vocab uses the PyQt library. This means that it should run on Linux and MacOSX. Windows support is planned for the future.
Madabar Vocab is released under the GPL, which means that you can freely distribute the program, and modify it if you wish.
I was inspired to write Madabar Vocab after trying out KWordQuiz. It had a nice simple interface, but I wanted something that was more flexible and that I could hack in Python.
Last updated: 2005/09/03