The basic idea with these quizzes is that a word or phrase will be presented to you in the Entry field, and notes on the word or phrase, such as alternative definitions, or a word's gender or person, may be presented in the notes about this entry: field.

You must enter the exact definition for the Entry in the Translation field, and then either click or tab out of that field, or click on the pruebame (test me) button below the Translation field.

If you are correct a new word will be presented to you. If you are wrong, a dialog box will give you the correct translation. You can then try the entry again, or if you prefer you can click the right arrow button next to the navigate: area of the screen, to go to another entry. In general, the navigate buttons will let you move right or left in the catalog, or reposition yourself to the current testing entry (which is useful after doing a lookup (see below) to reposition yourself back to the current test word.

Please note that when taking these quizzes, accents and special characters are represented as a separate character after the character that is thus affected. For example: espan~ol or e'sto. The reason for this is because Javascript currently does not understand special characters like accents, and Windows does not very easily let you enter those characters, which would make this test very difficult to take...

Also, all phrases or words are entered in lower case to make it easier to take the test; the obvious exception in English is the word I. Whenever special formatting is shown always follow the formatting exactly as shown on the page. For example: ?cual es...? should be translated as which is...?

The default subject you will be tested on when starting the quizz is either 'Any' for the dictionary, or 'Preterite Imperfect Drill' for the Drill. To change the testing subject click on the subject selector on the left middle of the test. When you highlight and select a subject title the test will be changed to that subject. Please note that, as you take the tests, the subject may indicate a different subject than the one you selected. This is because some words may belong to more than one subject: for example, a word like esbelto (slender) belongs to both the adjective subject and the body subject. Every word has a base subject; for esbelto that is adjectives. So if you're taking a test on the subject of 'body' the subject will show as 'adjective' when the word esbelto is presented to you. Sorry if this is a bit confusing- I hope to make this clearer in the future...

The tests are generally presented in alphabetic order by spanish definitions. You can randomize the test by clicking on the Randomize Subjects button. The subject will be reordered. To reorder the subject, click the Randomize Subjects button again.

If you want to see your progress at any time, you can click on the Show Scores button at the bottom right of the screen, which will tell you how many guesses you've made, how many errors you've made, and your current score. If you believe that an error in the test caused your score to be lower then you can click on the No Fair! button, which will reduce your errors by 1 each time you click on it. Hey! No cheating!! The second row of values in the score window tells you, in order, the length of the dictionary in total, the length of the current testing subject, and your position within that subject.

If you want to retest yourself on any errors you've had while taking the test you can click on the Test me on my Errors button. The test will then be reordered to include only those entries that you've gotten wrong. This can be a good way to reinforce your training: every time you get a word correct the error count for that word is reduced or set to zero, so you can hone in on the words you're having problems with, and keep hitting the Test me on my Errors button until you have no errors remaining.

However you may want to study a subject, or see what words are included in that subject as a whole. To do that, click on either the Make Subjectbook button, which will open a new window with all the words for the last subject you selected displayed, or click on the Make Studybook button, which will open a new window and format the contents of the entire dictionary. Caution! Currently the catalog has about 3,000 words in it, so making an entire subjectbook can take a long time, and you may encounter memory problems if your computer doesn't have enough memory for the entire study book!!

Lastly, the Find field and buttons let you lookup words and phrases in the dictionary. To use the Find feature, enter the word or phrase you're looking for in the Find field and either tab or click out of that field, or click on any of the find buttons. You can do a find by 'next' (look for the next occurence from where you are in the catalog currently; by 'words only' to look for whole words that have the object you're looking for; by 'english, spanish, english word, or spanish word' to look only in the enlish or spanish entries in the catalog, either by word or anywhere in the phrase; or from the top or bottom of the catalog, or forward or backwards from your current location in the catalog. Honestly, it's easier than it sounds :)

Lastly, there are bound to be complaints about this or that translation or interpretation, and the whole concept of entering phrases which can be formed using different words or in various ways that still carry the same meaning, is bound to annoy the average user. Please keep in mind that this facility was developed to help me, Phil Zampino, learn the language, and the words and phs were generally selected to follow the class I'm taking, or seemed illustrative of a certain lesson I needed to learn. Hey, whatcha want for free? :)