ProVoc: A Free and Easy-To-Use Vocabulary Trainer
Originally downloaded 4/21/06. It’s amazing to me how much great free software you can find for the Mac nowadays. Look at this beauty! I’m not often finding the need to learn new words or a new language, but the prospect of being able to download translations to the iPod for future travel is very tempting. Plus it looks cool, and my kids might be able to use it NOW. Did I mention that the company provides downloadable files for a slew of languages, including translations for German-English, French-English, Taiwanese-English, Japanese-English, and… how’s this? Latin-German!
Update 2/22/07. Well, I still haven’t had time to learn a new language, but I now know exactly where to go when I do! I am just as amazed now as I was last year by the breadth, beauty, and functionality of Provoc. In a nutshell, this is a tool you can use as a set of interactive lessons, as a refresher course, or as an author who wants to make your own Provoc language training docs. You can do this while at your Mac in the regular Provoc interface, or in its lovely full-screen mode (which incorporates elegant Quartz animations in the background…), or in Dashboard, using the provided widget. Oops! I almost forgot! You can of course download the lessons to your iPod and review while traveling. Even if you’re still learning, you may want to make a custom Provoc document containing words you particularly want to learn. What I didn’t realize last year but do now is that a large number of the language guides you can download for free are made by Provoc users. Each is described, and you can take the words, phrases, or lessons from any of these and mix and match to put together your own custom guide. Provoc incorporates video and audio and takes full advantage of the wonderfully rich computer you’ve got sitting there in front of you.
If you do use Provoc, do drop a few bucks in the programmer’s tip jar. Arizona makes a lot of other great software, and they’re absolute champs for giving this gem away. Oh, and I almost forgot to mention… Provoc is lavishly endowed with help documentation, and the website has numerous QuickTime videos showing you the various ways you can use it.
Version as tested: 4.2.
