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Tibetan Flashcards 0.2

Download the flashcards here

Now for the iPod too! iPod Tibetan Flashcards

You will need two things:

1. jMmemorize 1.3.0, which you can get here

2. Tibetan Machine Uni font, which you can get here or another Tibetan Unicode font. Note: Tibetan Machine Uni should work on a Mac even though Mac isn't listed under 'Platforms' and Vista comes with 'Microsoft Himalaya' (a Tibetan Unicode font) pre-installed.

If you have Tibetan Machine Uni or other Tibetan Unicode font properly installed, you can open up jMemorize and go to File > Preferences and see the font listed under 'Font'. Then change every relevant instance of 'Font settings' to be Tibetan Machine Uni, namely 'Frontside', 'Frontside(Cards)', and 'Frontside(Learn)'. And choose a decent size for each, maybe 36. Choose whatever font and size you want for the Flipside as they are in English.

There are 61 sets of 3,000 flashcards. I chose the amount 3,000 in order to reduce the time it takes for the cards to load. If you're having problems with load time, try the set titled 'ka_to_kab_tshe_pa.jml'. It only has 650 cards. If 3,000 takes too long to load or causes the program to hang, please leave me a comment saying so.

Now the cool thing about the jMemorize program is you can really customize the cards and the learning. As far as customizing the cards, you can add pictures, edit the definitions, or if you decide that you don't need to know a certain word, just delete that card. A good way of editing the definitions is checking the Rangjung Yeshe Wiki and typing the Wylie into the search box, which will give you the definition from a handful of dictionaries.

As far as customizing the learning, when you click 'Learn' to begin your session, you can edit General, Advanced, and Scheduling options. Scheduling is important as you want to have the cards presented to you at the ideal moment to practice what you've learned. Didn't know that there WAS an ideal moment to practice what you've learned? There is a great article about algorithmic learning here

I've been using these flashcards without a hitch on Windows XP, Vista, and Mac OSX (except for some Tibetan stack issues, which I think are related to jMemorize). I'd be interested to know of other people's successes or failures on other systems.

If you're interested in helping out and want to take a particular set, jazz it up with pictures, etc., I'd be willing to include your set in the next release.

For the time being, please send comments to - writepython at gmail dot com

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