Sven Utcke's Quizcard-Page

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What is it?

Quizcard is a flashcard-style programs for learning foreing languages. It was written specifically for one purpose only: to serve my needs. Which are:

• Needs to run on a number of old DOS-laptops.
• Needs to run under Unix/Linux.
• Needs to be able to deal with the simple fact of life that one word in Language_A can have more than one tranlation in Language_B.

What I didn't need were a fancy UI, so it doesn't have one, and therefore might not be to anyone's liking. But if you do like it, use it (see license below).

Usage

Currently, quizcard supports ASCII, CP437, CP850, and (under Linux) ISO-Latin-1. Make sure to have a look at "Setup" to see if the settings are correct (I believe that automatically selecting the right coding system is still on the todo-list); after that, everything else ought to be automagically. You can enter accented letters using the keyboard (easy on the LX) or using a special ASCII-notation:

Using a character which isn't supported by your codingpage (say you are using ASCII, or cp437, or some character not in latin-1) will work --- i.e. quizcard will do the right thing, it just can't display the letter (and will instead display the transliteration) as the letter isn't part of your codepage.

Adding (a few) more coding systems would be easy --- more than a few, however, would require a mayor rewrite.

As I already said above, in contrast to paper-cards, here all cards are one-sided, and each card from Language_A can point to several cards from Language_B. Giving any correct answer will suffice, also cards are only phased out after each answer has been given 3 (by default) times. Giving the wrong answer means that you start over with this card.

The comparison ignores (white)space differences, as well as everything in [] or (), including the parentheses / brackets. This allows you to have explanatory text like "to tack [naut.]", grammatical usage like "to snitch (on so.)", or helpful hints like "(white)space". Well, it actually works the other way round, first removing the parentheses / brackets, then duplicate spaces. Spaces are also removed following punctuation marks and at the beginning/end.

License

You are very much welcome to use this code any way you see fit. I use it, and so far haven't lost any data (or at least haven't noticed the loss) - but this IS alpha-quality code, and you could lose information. You have been warned!

That said, I would be delighted if this would turn out to be any use to someone, and even mored delighted to receive any Bug-reports or feature-requests.

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