werner@aecom.YU.EDU (Craig Werner) (01/03/88)
There exist a variety of tutorial programs to help one learn
a foreign language, such as French, Spanish, etc., etc...
Does anyone know of a similar program (running under MS-DOS)
that provides a tutorial for Latin?
Thanks in advance.
--
Craig Werner (future MD/PhD, 3 years down, 4 to go)
werner@aecom.YU.EDU -- Albert Einstein College of Medicine
(1935-14E Eastchester Rd., Bronx NY 10461, 212-931-2517)
"If it weren't for politicians, who would fashion disorder out of chaos."malibo@arizona.edu (Rob McConeghy) (01/06/88)
In article <1531@aecom.YU.EDU>, werner@aecom.YU.EDU (Craig Werner) writes: > > There exist a variety of tutorial programs to help one learn > a foreign language, such as French, Spanish, etc., etc... Not really, there are a few really bad commercial "educational" packages that consist mainly in rather bizarre drills on a faily small group of vocabulary words, or a few simplistic paradigm drills for verb endings, etc. I know of no really good software available to the general public that will really help you learn a foreign language. The better systems that exist are mostly "in house" systems developed at various universities. These tend to have been written to parallel specific courses and assume that you are attending classes and reading some textbook and listening to tapes at the language lab as well as using the computerized lessons. They also are usually designed to run only on the equipment that they have (or had) at the institution where the courses were developed. > > Does anyone know of a similar program (running under MS-DOS) > that provides a tutorial for Latin? > I haven't seen anything for Latin except the courseware designed for the PLATO system. This was written to be used with the book by Wheelock that is published by COS. I think that some of the PLATO courses were ported to MSDOS compatible systems a few years back and were commercially available but I don't think that Latin was one of them. The Latin course was not really very good. It was mostly a series of vocabulary drills and fill in the blank type quizzes with some translation exercises. It started out being mildly fun to use but after 15 or 20 lessons of the same type of simplistic drills over and over it became really boring. I am doing preliminary work on a much more complex language tutorial system that will include trapping of common or repeated errors, automatic branching to remedial drills and tutorial modules, assisted reading, etc. This system will be designed to be portable to various micros. We are currently only in the early design and prototyping stage. We plan to have example modules for French, Latin, and Chinese at a faily early stage but no complete courses will be developed until the system design is faily well stabilized. The initial prototype is being designed for the Amiga, with simultaneous development of barebones MSDOS monochrome versions. The system is being designed to run on "out of the box" machines so that it will have the widest portability. If anyone out there has any wish-lists on what they'd like to see in a foreign language CAI/CMI system I'd be happy to hear from you. Rob McConeghy ( malibo@arizona.edu ) 1940 TamO'Shanter ave. Tucson, AZ 85710