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Vocabularies and other useful stuff for learning foreign languages

ByHeart Repository

ByHeart Repository (http://www.byheart.nm.ru, extensively updated on March 28, 2005) is a great place to visit if you use ByHeart. All ByHeart vocabularies (more than 100 vocabularies, over 8 Mb in zips) and other materials are available there for browsing and downloading "a la carte".

Alternatively you can obtain vocabularies in other ways. A lot of vocabularies are assembled into option packs, which are available for downloading. 3 option packs have been released for now. The list of the vocabularies they contain can be viewed on the separate page.

Localization

ByHeart interface can be easily translated into almost arbitrary language. The distribution kit contains the sets of strings for interface in English and Russian, as well as a demo set (with partial translation) in German.

In addition to them, the following sets of strings are also available:

Spanish interface (bhlocspa.zip, 13K), translated by Santiago Cortina;
Catalan interface (bhloccat.zip, 13K), translated by Santiago Cortina;
Czech interface (bhloccze.zip, 14K), thanks to its author Petr Slameny;
Ukrainian interface (bhlocukr.zip, 14K) , translated by Serhiy Sotnik;
Lithuanian interface (bhloclit.zip, 13K) , prepared by Rimantas Balcaitis.

In order to install an additional interface you should:

download one of abovementioned zip-files that you need;
unzip it into ByHeart work directory;
open Options Dialog;
switch to Interface tab;
choose the included bhloc***.ini file from the list of available sets and press Apply button.

Learning through a singing

15 december 1998 a new product, namely ByHeart Karaoke, has been released. In order to find out what is it and how it can help you in learning foreign languages, you can visit the ByHeart Karaoke page.

Sound bridge for Lingvo 5.0 and 6.0

Sound bridge for Lingvo 5.0 and 6.0 enables you to listen to pronunciation of english words from the Lingvo sound vocabulary within ByHeart.

Vocabularies for Tutor

Tutor is yet another useful program for learning foreign languages. The Tutor's author, Daniel Green, gave me a kind permission to include his English-German dictionary into ByHeart distribution kit. Also ByHeart uses an enhanced learning method based on the original one developed by Daniel for Tutor, and allows a user to load and save vocabularies of Tutor format.

You can visit Tutor home page at http://www.superliminal.com/tutor/tutor.htm and check it for some interesting dictionaries. Maybe you will find that Tutor itself is worth to be downloaded.

yHeart is used by thousands of people all over the world. This is the place where they share their knowledge and ideas. The most simple way to contribute to the common deed of ByHeart evolution is to share a self-made vocabularies and multimedia stuff. Besides there are some additional utilities that extend the base functionality of ByHeart. Finally it should be mentioned that the World Wide Web has a lot of resources which can be useful for computer-aided learning foreign languages. So why not to place some links here?¶

Multimedia stuff
ByHeart vocabularies can optionally contain a pictures and sounds. This makes it easier to learn a meanings of words and their pronunciation. You can find a wide variety of pictures in WWW. To do so simply launch any search engine and enter the string "free clipart". Undoubtedly, the most effective search engine is MetaCrawler. It sends a queries to the other popular search engines and combines all responses into a generalized compacted list.

Making sound files smaller
With ByHeart you can learn a pronunciation of a words by ear. For this purpose ByHeart handles a WAV files which can occupy a lot of space on a disk. One of a possible solutions of this problem is install Fraunhofer MPEG Layer-3 Audio Codec. This software is capable of squeesing WAV files 10 times or so. The URL of the corresponded page at the Fraunhofer Institut Integrierte Schaltungen IIS is http://www.iis.fhg.de/audio.

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