Quick Start

General Operation

• Make sure you have read the "Installation" section for your platform.
• Make a copy of the "mainWordlist.fsf" (eg call it "myWordlist.fsf").
• Launch FoundationStone.
• Load your wordlist by pulling down the "File" menu, and selecting "Open...".
• Click NEXT to begin and display the first word.
• Click RIGHT if the word was right, the program will decrease how often the word is presented to you.
• Click WRONG if you did not know the word, the program will increase the frequency you see this word.
• Click NEXT if you wish to advance to the next word, without adjusting anything about the word.
• Filters allow you to restrict the words you see.
• Bring the mouse to rest over some item on screen, without clicking it. A "tool tip" message will show up with information about what it does. You don't need to understand every function for the application to be useful.
• Be sure to back up your wordlists once a week! If you don't you risk losing your personalised statistics - which is how the program tunes itself to you.

How To Study Your Vocabulary

This program is most effective when used in conjuction with the Online Hebrew Tutorial. Additionally you will benefit by: taking a formal course of study, participating in tutorial groups, reading practice, other coursebooks, watching Hebrew movies and ideally a real live teacher.

To learn the words simply requires regular practice. The more practice the better! Some ideas here are -

• If you have an office job, you can learn for 20 minutes during your lunch break. By having the program on your computer at work, and keeping the wordlist on a floppy disk, CD-RW or USB memory dongle, you can take it between work and home.
• Similarly a teacher may like to have students bring their wordlists to a lab session, then go home and do some further homework.

Get into a schedule of reviewing words of different difficulties at different frequencies -

Conceptually, you aim to push the words up to difficulty 1 (words you find easiest to remember) through regular practise.

You can reset your entire list, or individual word types at any time (back to difficulty 3) by using the "Utility" menu's "Set Current Word Types to Default Difficulty...".

Read the rest of this Online Help - for example, there are some non trivial tips on the Psychology of Learning that can improve your effectiveness and motivation.