Vocabulary Quiz Programs
                              (FRENCH and GERMAN)
     
                                  by Jon Dart
                      1866 Diamond St., San Diego CA 92109
     
          The programs FRENCH and GERMAN are a kind  of  "electronic  flash
     card"  system  for learning vocabulary words in these languages.  Each
     program first prompts the user for the number of items  in  the  quiz.
     Then  it randomly selects this number of words from its data files and
     asks the user for a translation of each word (e.g. French  to  English
     or  English  to  French).  It can also present a quiz on the gender of
     nouns. The user can repeat the quiz as many times as desired, until  a
     perfect score has been obtained.
     
          The  program  FRENCH.COM  uses  two  data  files,  FRNOUN.DAT and
     FRNONOUN.DAT. FRNOUN contains  French  nouns,  and  FRNONOUN  contains
     adjectives  and  verbs.  These  are  ordinary  ASCII  files and can be
     modified or updated using any text editor. The first line of each data
     file must be a number containing the total number of data items in the
     file.  Every time you add something to the file, you must update  this
     number.   The  format  of  the  lines is slightly different in the two
     files.  For FRNOUN.DAT, a line looks like this:
     
          ATELIER/M/WORKSHOP;STUDIO
     
          The first word is French.  I have omitted all  accent  marks  and
     other  diacritics  in the file.  The French word must be followed by a
     slash ("/") and then by "M" if  it  is  masculine  or  "F"  if  it  is
     feminine.   Then  there  is  another  slash,  followed  by the English
     translation.  Any number of alternative  translations  can  be  given,
     separated  by  semicolons.   The  length  of the line, however, cannot
     exceed 80 columns.
     
         The format of the file FRNONOUN.DAT is the same, except that since
     the words in this file are not nouns, there is no gender for  them.  A
     typical line from this file looks like this:
     
         ABASOURDIR/TO DEAFEN;TO DAZE
     
         The data files included on the disk are all in upper case, and are
     sorted alphabetically, but neither of these features is necessary; the
     program  will accept lower case entries, and data items can be entered
     in any order. The French words in  the  files  are  fairly  difficult,
     since  I  have  deliberately  left  out  common  words (e.g. "maison",
     "arbre") that I have no difficulty in remembering.
     
         The program for German words is very similar.  It  uses  the  same
     format  for  data  files;  only  the  names of the files are different
     (GENOUN.DAT and GENONOUN.DAT). I have put a quote mark after  a  vowel
     in  these files to indicate an umlaut. I do not know German as well as
     I know French, so the data  files  are  shorter  and  contain  simpler
     words.