October 6, 2008
We have been receiving a lot of questions from potential customers who want to know whether a particular product, AccelaStudy Japanese for example, is also useful for a Japanese speaker who wants to learn English. The answer is YES! All of the AccelaStudy foreign language products have been explicitly designed to work in either direction, English to Japanese, for example, as well as Japanese to English. This is one of the main reasons we localize the user interface of each application in 10 languages in addition to English.
To help address this issue and to solve a future product disambiguation issue, we are renaming the products in the AccelaStudy foreign language line to indicate both languages. So AccelaStudy Japanese will become AccelaStudy Japanese | English to reflect that it helps a student who wants to learn either language.
All existing products will take on this name change in the next few days. This name change facilitates the release of a series of new products later this month.
As always, thanks for your support and please let us know your thoughts either by email or in our support forum!
October 1, 2008
We’re pleased to announce that AccelaStudy v1.1 has been released to Apple for review. We look for them to approve this update within the next few days, appearing in the App Store by the end of the weekend. This is the most significant update to the software since v1.0. The primary feature in this update is the ability to now create your own custom study sets of words. These study sets can then be used as the source of words for Study Mode, Flashcard Mode, and Quiz Mode. There are a few things to keep in mind when creating your study sets:
- Study sets can be made up of as few or as many words as you want. We’ve tested with study sets with only 1 vocabulary word and we’ve tested with study sets with all vocabulary words and everything in between.
- Study sets can only be made up of words from the master vocabulary list. There is no facility to enter your own words from scratch. Our solution to this is to continually expand the master list until we have at least 6,000 words per language, with some languages going to 8,000 words and some to over 10,000 words.
- In addition to being able to use your study sets for Quiz Mode, you can also now use selected categories. This has not been the case in previous versions of the product. In previous versions, the source of the words for Quiz Mode has been the entire master vocabulary list and there was no way to focus on any particular set of words.
- To use a study set in Quiz Mode, the study set must have at least as many words as the number of questions on the quiz. So for a quiz with 10 questions, the study set must have at least 10 words. This is also true when using selected categories as the source of quiz questions. The total number of words across all selected categories must be at least 10 words to be used for a 10-question quiz.
- The quiz difficulty setting is not observed when using study sets or selected categories as the source of words for a quiz. It is assumed that if a word is in the study set or category, the user wants to be quizzed on it.
In our testing, having the quiz mode use a study set as the source of quiz questions significantly accelerates memorization of those words.
The implementation of the Leitner system of spaced repetition was, unfortunately, pushed back to the v1.2 release, which will be available in the next couple of weeks. This is in part so that we can take user feedback on study sets into account before releasing this new functionality as study sets are a key part of implementing the Leitner system.
As always, we look forward to hearing from our users on these new features.
