The Lexis Rex software has 3 major components, a vocabulary window,
a flash card creator and a flash card viewer:
1. Vocabulary Discoverer window:
- contains over 20,000 words and idioms from the current language vocabulary.
By using the analysis of hundreds of thousands of sentences of real world speech and writing, Lexis Rex is
able to present these words in the order of usage, i.e. from the most common words to the least.
This ordering allows you to efficiently learn the most common words first.
- for each word a set of meanings are provided if available in your language (meanings may also be manually added)
- for each word a list of derivative words are displayed (the "Inflections"),
for example, plurals, verb tenses, gender alternatives etc. Some languages have
tens and tens of inflections for a single verb, again Lexis Rex is able to take
advantage of a huge corpus of speech and writing to order and narrow down on only the most common
inflections to help you focus your learning.
- for each of these inflections example sentences are given.
- (French version only) for nouns a definite or indefinite article can be displayed against the word to indicate gender
- (French version only) audio tracks of words and sentences (about 2000 mp3 tracks) as spoken by a native French speaker
- (French version only) sentences may be read as a whole or one word at a time, to ease you into improving your listening skills
- navigation through the word list can be performed by using the buttons, using the Search box, by clicking in the Word Map area or by clicking on the word in the example sentence
- each word in the example sentence shows a popup listing its meanings when the mouse pointer is over it.
- you can track your learning progress by flagging a word as "known". This is indicated on the screen in various ways:
- the Progress chart shows a graph showing how your vocabulary improves with time
- the Word Map area shows a blue color for that word, giving feedback on the fraction and pattern of words known
- the example sentence colors the words that you know
- the Word Map, useful for navigation and knowledge feedback, shows a square array of words ordered according to their frequency of usage from common words in the top left to rare words in the bottom right.
- words or Inflections may be easily added to a flash card set using the "card" buttons.
- a sentence can also be added in this way, which would be useful if you want to repetitively practice listening to a whole sentence to learn to discern speech.
- (French version only) you can display and learn the alphabet and the pronunciation of each letter.
- you can display and learn numbers.
- a wizard is available to help you easily generate exercises.
2. Flash Card Creator:
- the Flash Card Creator integrates with the Vocabulary Discoverer but also allows you to create your own cards with whatever words you want to learn
- you can add images to flash cards
- audio files or your own recordings can be added
- card colors and text font can be customized
- the flash card set you create can be uploaded to be accessed on a cell phone via a WAP browser.
3. Flash Card Viewer:
- the Flash Card Viewer can prompt you with each side of the Flash Card in order, reverse order or random order.
- either side of the card can be presented first to practice forward and backward translation of the words.
- these functions can be combined to avoid learning by association to the order of words rather than association to the words themselves
- words can be asked in groups to break up the Flash Card set into manageable portions
- user entry and feedback for self testing or checked testing, as well as implementing a Leitner system to provide for short and long term learning.
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