World Geography (Kazumi Hatasa and Sayuri Kubata)
System Requirements: HyperCard Player 2.1 or higher, 2.9MB of disk
space; JLK not required
Price: Freeware available for download at ftp://intersc.tsukuba.ac.jp/pub/World/
(or through http://www.sla.purdue.edu/academic/fll/Japanese/).
Review by Atsushi Fukada, Purdue University (IN)
World Geography is a collection of HyperCard stacks which provide
students with practice in reading katakana through recognizing and producing
katakana words. For this practice, names of countries in the world and US
state names are used, most of which are written in katakana. Africa, Asia,
Europe, South America, USA are covered. When you open each stack, you are
presented with a map of a region. There are two modes of operation: look-up
and exercises. In the look-up mode, you can click on any country or US state
to hear it pronounced and see how it is written in katakana at the same
time. When you switch to the exercise mode, you can specify the number of
items to include in one session (randomly selected) and what type of exercise
you want. There are three types: "click country", "listen
name", and "type name", which are described below. "click
country" - A country name is displayed at the top as a cue. You are
to identify that country on the map by clicking on it. If you get it right,
you will hear the name pronounced. If you make two mistakes, the program
tells you the correct answer. "listen name" - A "let me listen"
button appears at the top. You are to click on it to hear a country name
and identify it on the map. "type name" - A question mark appears
on a map. You are to identify that country and type in its name correctly
in katakana using roomaji input. When your answer contains mistakes,
the program provides useful feedback in the form of spelling error markup.
For this purpose a small set of symbols are defined, which tells the user
things like "there is a character missing here", "the voicing
marker is missing", "the smaller version of this character is
called for here", "this character doesn't belong here", etc.
For each of the exercises, there is a review feature which automatically
brings back items you have missed before for reinforcement. In short, this
program provides a lot of practice in katakana and foreign names, and you
can be sure that you will learn a lot about world geography at the same
time.
Venues: CmpLb, RscRm, SlfSt