LanguageMaster

The LanguageMaster Story

My passion for learning foreign languages and developing an easy way to master vocabulary began with the Chinese language. I wanted an easier way to quickly look up words so I developed a Chinese-English Instant Lookup Dictionary for the Amazon Kindle Paperwhite reader (Traditional, Simplified). By being able to look up words instantly simply by selecting them, I have been able to read books such as the first volume of Harry Potter in Mandarin Chinese.

When I started learning Spanish, I needed a better way to practice the myriad Spanish verb forms and developed an Excel spreadsheet to generate flashcards. My Spanish teacher liked it so much that she recommended that I market it. Spanish VerbMaster is the result. While developing Spanish VerbMaster, I also decided to create a spreadsheet of my Chinese-English dictionary to form a dictionary and vocabulary flashcard system.

I have made the verb application with a generic architecture so that it can be expanded to include verb programs for other languages such as French, German, Dutch, and English. The guiding principle of development has been to make easy the methods that have helped me in studying French, German, Mandarin Chinese, Spanish, and Dutch. In Chinese VocabMaster have incorporated a simplified Leitner box version of spaced repetition to maximize the efficiency and efficacy of vocabulary review.

I have programed in Microsoft Office Access, Excel, and Word for more than 20 years and have found Excel to be extremely powerful for developing these applications, allowing extensive use of Excel's filtering, sorting, and dynamic array capabilities.

In offering these applications to you, it is my hope that they will be as useful to you as they continue to be to me in my own on-going language study. Enjoy!