More Svenska Software: BYKI
Tonight’s semi-desperate attempt to improve my Swedish is the free download from Before You Know It. I shouldn’t complain too much over free software — but you know I will.
First, the good points: though the freeware is mostly flashcard-based, I actually kind of like it. It pronounces the words for you, and you can flip them over to see the translation. What I particularly appreciate is the different levels of drills: the tests allow you to practice supplying the English word from the Swedish, and, more importantly to me, the Swedish word from the English. I really like that, and I find myself getting competitive and trying to go through the cards more and more quickly without mistakes.
Drawbacks? Firstly, the obvious way to type special characters (using the Special Characters dialog box from the menu) is clunky and inconvenient. I haven’t yet gotten the hang of using ASCII codes on Errol — no clue, actually, so as long as I’m blogging on the Mac you’re just going to have to go without a-with-circley-bits and so on being typed properly — so that’s out, as well. I had to go to their Web site FAQ before I learned that you can just type a plain letter, highlight it, and use the arrow keys to toggle between the possible accented variations. Better than the dialog box, but very frustrating.
The most maddening thing, however, is that it sometimes gives you homonyms (well, the case in point is actually more of two different nuanced definitions), but with no clue about which one it means. After the zillionth time the stupid BYKI software revealed that, no, it didn’t mean stad (town), it meant stad (city), as any idiot would’ve known, I kind of lost it. There was much ranting, and a fair amount of swearing and stomping and arm-waving and such. I mean, it’s the same freakin’ word! If you’re going to count it wrong if I fail to guess which one you mean, at least give me a visual clue somewhere on the card, some sort of context: a skyline for city-stad, and a thatched roof for town-stad or something.
Oh yeah, it also doesn’t recognize synonyms when you provide the English translations (e.g., defining the Swedish glad as, well, “glad” instead of the “happy” the software insists it is), and woe betide anyone who forgets to punctuate exactly the way it’s been shown to you.
No software minions in this one. I’m not sure whether that’s a good thing or a bad. I find myself kind of missing Mr. Blinky from the EuroTalk CD, in a weird sort of way.
Gah. I’m all annoyed now. Guess I’ll put a perfect cap on the evening and go finish watching “Das Boot,” to thoroughly depress myself and also help me further confuse my Swedish and German vocab. (It’s probably bad enough that, in addition to failing to guess whether the software means “city” or “town” when it says stad, I already keep pronouncing it “Stadt.”)
Hi,
I work for Transparent Language, the company that makes BYKI and runs byki.com. A couple of comments I hope you will find useful…
To enter accented letters, you don’t need to highlight anything. Just enter the base letter, then press the up arrow until you see the accented form of that letter that you want. The program knows what accents are used on what letters in what languages, so if you want an accented o, for instance, it’s usually just press o, press UpArrow. No need to to use the mouse or remove your hands from the keyboard.
As to synonyms, if you want city or town to be both accepted as correct answers, just check the “alternative answer” box when it tells you one of them is wrong. From then on, both will be accepted as correct.
The same goes for the other direction, where you are looking at Swedish and answering in English. If you typed “twon” instead of “town,” for instance, just tell it to take that as a correct answer by checking that same “alternative answer” box. After all, you’re not learning to type in English; the point is that you did know the meaning of the Swedish word or phrase, and the English typo is irrelevant in that regard.
Using the “alternative answer” function, you can also choose if you care whether a word is correctly capitalized, whether there is a comma, etc. Different users will set the line in different places.
October 29th, 2006 | #