Welcome to the New Website

After weeks in design, the new AccelaStudy website went live last night!  We hope you like it!  Among other optimizations, this design features:

• Prominent links to Support and Demos, the two most popular areas of the site
• Integrated blog
• Much more product description
• A much more professional look and feel

What you see today is also changing and improving day-by-day and we will be adding the following content over the next few days and weeks:

• Product demos for all products
• Frequently asked questions
• Tutorial videos
• More content, including the full list of categories used within AccelaStudy An alphabetical list of categories is now available here.

Special thanks to Tony Geer for the excellent design.  If you see anything that isn’t quite right with the website, rest assured it is due to our tinkering internally and not Tony’s handiwork.  We’re very pleased with Tony’s work and highly recommend him to anyone who has similar web design needs.

New Keyboards

The latest 2.1 update of the iPhone and iPod Touch operating system had some surprises in it!  One of the surprises is a set of new keyboards for entering text on the device.  The one we are excited about is the Turkish keyboard!  Previous versions of the operating system had support for most of the letters in the Turkish alphabet but several key ones were missing.  This new keyboard adds all of the missing letters!!!

Momentum

Over a week has passed since our last post to this blog.  It has been a very busy week, however, and now is a good time to take a quick break and discuss what we’ve been working on.

First, we’re all very thankful for the positive reviews that have been posted lately in the App Store.  In particular, we were very pleased to see that one of our favorite reviews (http://www.accelastudy.com/2008/08/25/we-love-good-criticism) has recently been updated by the original author to 5-stars with associated positive comments.  As always, we listen carefully to all customer feedback and work very hard to incorporate as much of that feedback as we can into each new release.  Thanks for being fair and recognizing these improvements!

Version 1.1 is the first “major” update to the AccelaStudy product line and is coming in the next week or so.  There are two primary changes to the application in this release:

User-defined study sets.

This feature enables the user to create custom sets of words (from the master list) and to use these sets in Study mode, Flashcard mode, and – if the set has enough words in it – Quiz mode.  Studying words from selected categories will still be available.  There is no limit to the number of study sets that can be created.  A study set can have as few as one word in it or as many as in the whole vocabulary list.

Leitner system repetition.

This feature, probably more than any other feature, will make the most difference in improving the effectiveness of AccelaStudy.  As everyone knows, there are some words in a set that you know better than others and some words you don’t know at all.  It is common sense, then, that more time should be spent studying the words you don’t know than studying the words you do.  In addition, when going through a large set of words, you don’t want to have to go through the whole set to get back to a word you just missed.  The longer you have to wait to see that word again, the less likely it is that you will remember it and learn it.  We use a custom implementation of the Leitner system to address all of these issues.

The new system works primarily with the Flashcard mode.  As you go through the words in Flashcard mode, you can indicate whether you “missed” the word or whether you “got it right”.  The system will keep track of these results and, as you continue to use the application, the words you “missed” will show up more frequently and the words you “got right” will show up less frequently.

We believe these two features will add significant value to your investment in our products.  We have built these features taking into account quite a bit of customer feedback in this area.  Of course, we are anxious to hear what you think about the changes.  This is a big release and, as is the case with most new features, there will probably be some tuning needed.  You can be certain, however, that we will continue to listen to our customers and make timely and useful updates.

Thanks for your support.

AccelaStudy Chinese and AccelaStudy Japanese

AccelaStudy Chinese is now available in the App Store!  It went live around midnight last night.  We are now free to submit v1.0.5 for both AccelaStudy Chinese and AccelaStudy Japanese.  The changes in this release are documented here.  Apple review is taking 5-6 days so these changes should be live next week.

Verbs, Verbs, and more Verbs

A lot of people have been inquiring lately about verbs being added to the AccelaStudy foreign language products.  We are definitely adding a lot of support for verbs but are doing so in a controlled and progressive manner over several releases.

Verb conjugation is one of the most difficult topics in foreign language education.  There are a couple of reasons for this:

One is that conjugating verbs in another language – Spanish, for example – is very different than how it is done in English.  The number of words is usually different.  For example, in English, the future tense of “to eat” is three words – “you will eat” – and the Spanish is one word – “comerás”.  And let’s not even get started on the complexities of Turkish verb conjugation, an agglutinative language where one very long word can almost constitute an entire sentence!

Second, most English speakers are not even aware of the names of the tenses they use in English, much less in another language.  Ask anyone what the Future Perfect/Anterior tense of “to eat” is and see if you get the correct response – e.g. “you will have eaten”.  So before studying verbs in another language, some students need to formalize their understanding of their existing language.

Once a student knows how to conjugate one form of a verb, they can pretty much conjugate any other verb that has the same form.  Then it becomes easy to expand vocabulary because then it is just a matter of memorizing all of the verbs of a particular form.

So how can AccelaStudy help with that?  Here are some of the ways:

• We can provide a reference.  Even students who study rigorously still need to look words up once in awhile.  So we can expand AccelaStudy’s search feature to allow a user to search for a verb and then easily look up a particular tense.
• We can provide a list of verb infinitives and organize them by form.  So, again with Spanish as an example, -er verbs, -ar verbs, and so on.
• We can help identify and remember the irregular verbs.
• We can provide help documentation within the application which explains verb usage, including reminders of what Pluperfect Indicative means, for example.
• We can use the quiz mode to improve mastery of the various conjugations of each verb.  We see users creating quizzes where the quiz material is simply one verb and its many conjugations.  For example, if the question shows English “I am eating” and then shows four Spanish conjugations of “comer”.  The user must recognize which conjugation is the correct one.

We are looking to provide a minimum of 300 verb infinitives in each language.  Some of them may go as high as 1,000 verbs.  For each verb there are, in general, the 7 simple tenses and 7 complex tenses and in a language like Spanish, for example, that means around 84 conjugations per infinitive.  So 300 verbs is actually 25,200 conjugations. 1,000 verbs is 84,000 conjugations.  So the size of the full verb vocabulary can easily dwarf the size of the normal vocabulary, which at the high end we expect to be around 8,000 words (more in Japanese and Chinese).

There are other ideas and features we have planned but we wanted to get this out to let our customers know that we are listening to the reviews and feedback and are working hard to provide verb support as soon as we can.  We’re also very interested in any ideas that you have as well.

Please feel free to post your ideas and suggestions in our Support Forum!