Learn Dialog

Purpose of the Learn Dialog: To become familiar with new words.

The Learn Dialog's main idea is to represent a short list of new words (local stack), and expose the user repeatedly with them one after the other. The small amount of words and the heavy repetition gives the user a chance to keep all the new words simultaneously in memory, which ensures an intensive short term memory awareness of the words being learnt. Once a word is known for the moment, it is replaced with a new one. The easier words leave the loop quickly, the hard ones stay for a longer time.

During learning, entries are generally not moved between stacks, but rather put back on the same stack after the learning activity. This is to avoid overly optimistic classifications based on short term memory.

Using the Learn Dialog

1. Learn content by repeated exposure
   When the Learn Dialog is opened, only one word is in the local stack. Use the round green button to iterate through the attributes according to the active skill . Since there is only one entry in the local stack, its attributes are redisplayed again and again, so quickly proceed to step 2.
   
2. Add additional entry
   If you feel comfortable with the content, press the arrow down button to add another entry to the local stack. With every additional entry, step 1 becomes more challenging.
   
3. Replace entry
   If you end up mastering a certain entry in the local stack, you can replace it with a new one by pressing the arrow up button. This will put the card back on the same stack without altering its statistics. Hopefully you will remember it next time when you use the TestDialog!

Notes:

• Declaring an item as known (arrow right ) should not be based on short term memory, therefore the corresponding button is normally disabled. It is only enabled at the first selection - this is to allow to declare previously mastered words as known.
• Declaring a word as unknown (arrow left ) is unusual since the entries are supposed to stay in the local stack until they are no longer unknown (for the moment).

Options

Detailed Local Stack
Display one attribute instead of the number. The attribute can be selected with the buttons on the bottom of the local stack.

Direct init instead of the default Gradual init
If the local stack is directly initialized, the predefined number of entries is directly added in black color. Visited entries are marked with blue color.

Skill selection
The active skill defines the appearance order of the attributes.

Arrow buttons and arrow keys

Learning is much more convenient using the keyboard instead of the mouse! This allows you to manipulate the Computer with your left hand, which keeps your right hand free for writing using pencil and paper.

The four upper arrow buttons of the learn dialog correspond to four keyboard arrow buttons, 'key down' is mapped to the space bar. Alternatively, the NumPad arrow keys can be used.

Dialog arrow buttons	Keyboard arrow keys	Keyboard NumPad

Note that the keyboard arrow keys only have an influence on the dialog arrow buttons if one of the dialog arrow buttons has the focus.

See Also

Basic Learn Dialog Elements